Category: Bazaar News

American painter Jasper Johns shook up the art world by reconceptualizing common icons like targets, numbers, and letters—and it all began in 1954 with Flag. 

Johns—who was born in Georgia in 1930—served in the Army for two years during the Korean War and was stationed in South Carolina and Sendai, Japan. In 1953, the 23-year-old returned to New York City, where he’d previously spent a semester at the Parsons School of Design. He enrolled in Hunter College for a time, but dropped out; by 1954, he was primed to create what would become his most popular piece. 

Johns has said that “One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag. And the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.”

In her book on Johns, art scholar Isabelle Loring Wallace wrote, “Johns did two things that would help establish his identity and significance as an artist. First, he systematically destroyed all existing work in his possession, vowing that henceforth his art would be free of perceptible debt to other artists. Secondly, he painted Flag.”

During a 1990 conversation with Interview magazine, the artist looked back on his career and shared this potentially telling anecdote: “In Savannah, Georgia, in a park, there is a statue of Sergeant William Jasper,” Johns said. “Once I was walking through this park with my father, and he said that we were named for him. Whether or not that is in fact true or not, I don’t know. Sergeant Jasper lost his life raising the American flag over a fort.” Whether his father’s story was true or not, it seemed to have a major impact on the artist.

The Abstract Expressionism propelled by the works of icons like Jackson Pollock in the 1940s was all the rage in the mid-1950s. But Johns rebelled against the movement’s emotional use of color and gesture, preferring common icons as inspiration.

As Johns explained it, “Using the design of the American flag took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets—things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels.” With composition and color fixed, these items urged Johns to express himself in challenging new ways. 

This movement embraces modern materials, popular imagery (like the American flag), and absurdity, while rejecting traditional aesthetics. 

To build the base, Johns used three pieces of plywood and a bedsheet cut to size. Then, in the words of the Museum of Modern Art, he used “oil paint and then encaustic, a method involving pigmented melted wax. Johns dipped strips of cloth and newsprint into the hot wax and then affixed them to the sheet to fill in a penciled outline of the flag.” The paint’s texture causes the lumpy look of the brush strokes. Its translucence allows newspaper ink to poke through in parts of the painting. Johns’s technique draws the viewer in, urging them to re-evaluate the iconic stars and stripes. 

Infrared photographs have shown a truly bewildering collage underneath Flag, from crossword puzzles to a receipt for a player piano as well as stock notices. But one of the stranger clippings is a panel from the comic Dondi. A visitor looking at the painting saw that the panel was clearly dated February 15, 1956, two years after the painting’s claimed completion date. A call to Johns revealed that the painting had been damaged during a party in 1956, and he’d repaired it with scraps of newspaper he had on hand.

“I worked on that painting a long time,” Johns said. “It’s a very rotten painting—physically rotten—because I began it in house enamel paint, which you paint furniture with, and it wouldn’t dry quickly enough. Then I had in my head this idea of something I had read or heard about: wax encaustic.” Encaustic dried quickly while also preserving Johns’s brushstrokes.

Encaustic painting—also known as hot wax painting—dates back to at least the Romano-Egyptian Fayum mummy portraits of the 1st century. Back then, beeswax was used not only to bind pigments but to add a sculptural element to paintings. Modern heating implements made it much easier to employ the method, and Johns’s use of the 1900-year-old technique electrified the modern art world. 

Flag measures in at 42 1/4 inches by 60 5/8 inches, or over 3 1/2 feet by 5 feet. 

Johns was a soldier who reclaimed his identity as an artist and re-imagined Old Glory as Flag. Created the same year the notorious McCarthy hearings drew to a close, the piece is assumed to have a political message, but no consensus has been formed on what that message is. 

In 1958, Flag caught the eye of Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), when it was exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery. Though Barr wanted the piece for the museum’s collection, he feared there would be trouble if the public interpreted Flag as unpatriotic, so he urged architect Philip Johnson to pick up the piece for his private collection. Fifteen years later, when Barr was set to retire, Johnson gifted his beloved Flag to MoMA in the former director’s honor. The piece can still be found there today. 

Johns could clear up all the political mystery, but he insists that his works are intended to be open to the interpretation of the viewer. He has never cemented their meanings and instead refers to his paintings as “facts.”

Though Johns created more than 40 variations on the theme, the three that are best known are Flag, White Flag, and Three Flags. For White Flag, Johns also employed encaustic and newsprint, but scrapped the red and blue and added in charcoal. Three Flags, which stacks three increasingly smaller canvases, broke records in 1980 when it sold to the Whitney Museum of Art for $1 million, the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist at the time. In 2010, another Johns flag painting from 1958 took that record again; the work was purchased by hedge fund billionaire Steven Cohen for a reported $110 million.

A version of this article was originally published in 2015 and has been updated for 2023.

Discover whether you are guilty of maleficium and/or would have been accused of practicing witchcraft according to the laws and evidence used during the 1692 Salem Witch Trials.

Are you a woman of any kind? If so, you are probably one of the devil’s many hellbrides. Since the medieval period, “an aspect of the female has been associated with the witch.” For thousands of years, people have believed women to be more susceptible to sins than men, and sinning is a clear indication of devil worship. In Salem, of the 19 people hanged for witchcraft, five were men and 14 were women. Historically, the numbers dramatically favor accused women over men.

The poor, homeless, and those forced to rely on the community for support were among the most vulnerable and often accused of witchcraft. Sarah Good, hanged in 1692, was extremely disliked and distrusted by neighbors because she wandered from house to house begging for food.

If you’re a grown woman living this life without any additional support, you probably also have a jar of eye of newt in your pantry. Any indication that a woman could live without the help or supervision of a man raised alarm. She would likely have been isolated from the community—until, of course, she was arrested and put on trial. Of the women we have enough information about, between 1620 and 1725 women without brothers or sons to share their inheritance comprised 89 percent of the women executed for witchcraft in New England.

A note to all popular teens and the cast of Sex and the City: A group of women congregating without a male chaperone was deemed a coven meeting to worship the Devil. (Nowadays, if you do come across a coven, these gift ideas for witches might come in handy.)

Infamous witchfinders like Matthew Hopkins and John Searne inspired such terror in the community that it didn’t take long for women to accuse other women of witchcraft as a way of deflecting their own indictments. According to author Elizabeth Reis, “women were more likely than men to be convinced of this complicity with the devil, and given such convictions about themselves, they could more easily imagine that other women were equally damned.”

Take the case of Rachel Clinton: “Women of worth and quality accused [her] of hunching them with her elbow” when she walked by them at church. Rachel, herself a former woman of “worth and quality,” had a mentally disturbed mother and a late-in-life marriage that caused her to slip to the bottom rung of the class system. Add to that some finger-wagging biddies screaming about an elbow jab and, double double toil and trouble, Rebecca was convicted of witchcraft.

The important thing to remember is that anyone could accuse anyone. And they did. If you found yourself accused of practicing witchcraft of any kind by any kind of person, you might as well have been seen flying naked over the moon on a broomstick made out of a cursed lover’s ears.

Older women, both married and unmarried, were extremely susceptible to accusations. Rebecca Nurse, for instance, was in her early seventies when she was tried, convicted, and put to death for being a witch.

Dorothy Good was only 4 years old when she confessed to being a witch (simultaneously implicating her mother, Sarah, who was hanged in 1692). Dorothy was imprisoned for nine months before her release. The experience had a permanent affect on her mental health.

There was one particular job that put women at risk of being accused: healers. One named Margaret Jones was executed in 1648. She had warned people that if they didn’t do her prescribed treatments, they’d keep being sick. Which today we’d say is just common sense.

The devil cursed your unholy womb with infertility. Plus, if your neighbors and their six children are suffering in any way, they almost certainly believe the jealous crone living next to them has hexed their home.

If a young couple nearby is having a difficult time conceiving, you are almost certainly stealing would-be babies from them. Because you are a witch.

Let loose any kind of sass or backtalk and ye be a witch, probably. Again, in the trial of Rachel Clinton, her accusers solidified the case against her with the following: “Did she not show the character of an embittered, meddlesome, demanding woman—perhaps in short, the character of a witch? Did she not scold, rail, threaten and fight?”

Any of these found on the body could be interpreted as the Devil’s mark. This is also where the witch’s familiar—usually animals like a dog, cat, or snake—would attach itself to her to drink her blood.

Several testimonials against witches mention spoiled dairy products in connection with the accused. Be honest about the condition of your fridge before you continue. If any of the local cows aren’t producing milk, that’s probably your fault, too.

Throw yourself directly into a blue hellfire if this one applies to you. One of the victims at Salem was Martha Corey, who in her youth had an illegitimate and likely mixed-raced son. She’d eventually marry twice, the second time to Giles Corey, who himself was noted as “a scandalous person in his former time.” When the witch trials came about, Martha’s past indiscretions didn’t exactly help her defense, and she was convicted and hanged. (Her husband would be famously pressed to death.)

Ever daydreamed about your soulmate? Written his name in cursive in your notebook? Then, like Tituba, an enslaved woman living in Salem, your activities could be construed as witchcraft. For a long time it was thought that Tituba encouraged young girls to predict the identities of their future husbands, and she became one of the first women in Salem accused of practicing the craft.

Breaking any biblical rule could lead to a witchcraft accusation. Remember: The Puritans strictly observed the Sabbath, which meant no kindling of fire, no trading, and no traveling. You couldn’t commit adultery, lead people to other Gods by prophecy or dreams, lie, be gluttonous, idle, or miss church. There would be no long hair and definitely no suffering a witch to live.

Did you do any of these things? Then congratulations, you are guilty of practicing witchcraft. You are hellbound, and will likely be hanged, burned, or left to rot in a filthy prison until you die. May the dark shadows cloak you in their wretched embrace. Hail Satan.

A version of this article was originally published in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.

The Terminator was released with not much promotion on October 26, 1984. James Cameron, its little-known writer and director,  had recently been living in his car, fresh from getting caught breaking into the editing room of his only other directorial effort, Piranha II: The Spawning.

With a production budget of just $6.4 million, it eventually earned over $78.3 million, making it one of the highest-grossing movies of the year. As we approach its 40th anniversary, here are some things you might not have known about the influential sci-fi thriller.

James Cameron had a tumultuous experience making his directorial debut in 1981’s Piranha II: The Spawning, but as he once put it, sometimes “nightmares are a business asset.” While in Rome for the horror movie’s release, Cameron had a fever dream of a “metal death figure coming out of a fire.”

According to Ellison, The Terminator was a “ripoff” of an episode of The Outer Limits he had written in 1964 titled “Soldier,” itself an adaptation of his 1957 short story “Soldier From Tomorrow.” Orion Pictures and the outspoken author settled out of court for an undisclosed amount of money. Cameron later referred to Ellison as a “parasite who can kiss my ass.”

There would never have been any lawsuits if James Cameron didn’t take a lot of risks to get the movie made in the first place. As the legend goes, Cameron’s agent hated the idea of the film, so Cameron, who was living in his car at the time, fired him.

An even more courageous move was Cameron’s insistence that he direct The Terminator, despite having only Piranha II: The Spawning on his resume. Instead of simply selling the script to the highest bidder, Cameron sold it to producer Gale Anne Hurd for a dollar, with the stipulation that he be allowed to direct his vision.

It was a gamble that paid off in more ways than one: Cameron and Hurd would marry in 1985 (though the pair divorced in 1989, and he subsequently remarried three more times, including to director Kathryn Bigelow and Terminator’s leading lady, Linda Hamilton).

Before James Cameron arrived at a pitch meeting with Hemdale Film Corporation producers, actor Lance Henriksen made an impression by kicking open the door and acting as the title character while wearing a leather jacket with gold foil affixed to his teeth. The performance was so believable that the secretary dropped her typewriter onto her lap. Henriksen ended up playing Detective Hal Vukovich for his trouble.

Because of the paltry $6.4 million budget, Cameron was mostly left alone by his financiers, Hemdale and Orion Pictures. Mostly. Hemdale’s John Daly wanted Cameron to cut out the striking final images of the movie in the factory, which earned him a “F*** you! The film isn’t over yet” in response.

Cameron was a little more receptive to Orion’s two suggestions, and supposedly less colorful in his responses. The first was to “strengthen the relationship” between Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), which was a note that Cameron took. The other was for Reese to have a cyborg canine companion; that one (perhaps sadly) did not happen.

It’s been bouncing around the internet for so long that you probably think it’s an urban legend, but Orion co-founder Mike Medavoy admitted in 2014 that he had strongly suggested O.J. Simpson for the part of the title role. Cameron dismissed the thought because Simpson came off as too nice of a guy.

When James Cameron went to have lunch with Schwarzenegger to discuss this, Cameron had a change of heart and asked if the actor would consider playing the titular villain instead, after Schwarzenegger kept telling him how he thought the T-800 should act.

Even though he had a lot of opinions on the character, Schwarzenegger didn’t like the idea of playing the bad guy, having just found success playing the heroic Conan in Conan the Barbarian, but eventually agreed. The awkwardness returned at the end of the meal, when Cameron realized that he had forgotten his wallet.

At the time, Sting was playing bass and writing songs for The Police, and was committed to star in David Lynch’s Dune. Another musician, Bruce Springsteen, was considered, even though he had no movie acting experience; Matt Dillon, Kurt Russell, Tommy Lee Jones, Mickey Rourke, Michael O’Keefe, Scott Glenn, Treat Williams, Christopher Reeve, and Mel Gibson were also on the radar.

Bruce Willis was another young actor who didn’t get the part. (But in a fun twist, Jai Courtney, the actor who played Willis’s son in A Good Day to Die Hard, starred as Kyle Reese in the 2015 Terminator reboot, Terminator: Genisys.)

The role of Kyle Reese ultimately went to Michael Biehn, despite disappointing producers by using a Southern accent in his initial audition. Once his agent explained to the producers that the accent came from practicing for a part in a Cat on a Hot Tin Roof stage production (which he didn’t even get), Biehn got another shot. “I went back in and read for Jim again, and the rest is kind of history,” Biehn said in a 2011 interview with Den of Geek.

According to fellow bodybuilder Rick Wayne, who visited Schwarzenegger on the set of 1984’s Conan the Destroyer, the Austrian-born powerhouse was less than impressed with his upcoming film. He reportedly referred to The Terminator as “some sh*t movie” he was doing.

Linda Hamilton wasn’t too keen on the film, either, in part because Schwarzenegger was so green as an actor. “I was a snotty New York actress, you know,” she later said, but eventually changed her tune upon seeing him in action. When Biehn told his actor friends he was doing a movie with Schwarzenegger, they sarcastically told him, “Well, good luck with that.”

Biehn’s done a lot of running, jumping, and fighting onscreen, but when it came to the stunts in The Terminator, there was one in particular he didn’t do—and the actor claims it was one of the toughest he ever witnessed.

For the scene where Reese drops down from a flash in the sky and lands in a downtown L.A. alleyway, Biehn claims they had a stuntman who was about 7 feet off the ground, laying on some 4-by-4s. “When Jim called action,” Biehn said, “[the stuntman] just jumped off sideways—and he was completely nude, of course—and landed straight like, onto the cement. And that cement was the cement, it wasn’t like, padded cement.”

Biehn noted that if you watch the scene, you’ll notice that the cement doesn’t move at all, but the stuntman’s body “kind of crunches in” over it. “I’ve been in the business for 40 years,” the Aliens star added. “And that is one of the most difficult stunts I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Thinking he had trouble pronouncing “I’ll” properly, Schwarzenegger asked Cameron if he could say, “I will be back” instead, with the reasoning being that the T-800 would not speak in contractions.

Cameron snapped, “Don’t tell me how to write. I don’t tell you how to act.” He then assured his star that they would shoot 10 takes and pick the one that sounded best. In Shawn Huston’s novelization of the film script, the line is “I’ll come back.”

Technically, the T-800 says more than Arnold’s 17 sentences, but one is an overdubbed voice of a cop, and the other is in Sarah Connor’s mother’s voice, when the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 is trying to trick her.

To work around this, all of the scenes where Sarah Connor runs from the T-800 (like the famous Tech Noir scene above) were shot at the tail end of the shooting schedule.

In one draft of the screenplay, Cameron wrote that Connor had an old figure skating injury that required surgical pins in her tibia. When the T-800 kills the first two Sarah Connors, he cut their legs open to look for the surgical mark. This was taken out of the final cut.

If you own an Apple II, and you enter ] call -151 * p at the basic prompt, you get the Terminator’s view.

The Polish word for “terminator” loosely translates to “apprentice,” which doesn’t really capture the essence of what James Cameron and company were going for. When the movie became popular in Poland, the subsequent films stuck with the original titles.

When T-800’s hand is getting pummeled by a lead pipe by Kyle Reese, it was Tom Woodruff Jr., who worked special effects, allowing his hand to get the beating of a lifetime.

Naturally, he lost feeling in his fingers. As a reward, James Cameron sent him a Christmas card that read, “Merry Christmas. Hope the feeling comes back to your fingers someday.”

You can file this one under weird stuff you probably didn’t know. Reportedly, David Hyde Pierce (of Frasier fame) had his first role as the co-driver of the tanker truck hijacked by the T-800. However, the actor has gone out of his way to point out that it was a different actor with the name David Pierce, and his IMDb page doesn’t list it any more as a past appearance.

Peter Cullen was the original voice of Optimus Prime, and reprised his role for the 2010s Transformers movies. Cullen has range—he also was the voice of Eeyore from 1988-2010.

A version of this article was originally published in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.

Dracula needs no introduction, but we’ll give him one anyway: Bram Stoker’s vampire, a Transylvanian count who turns into a bat, sleeps in coffins, and drinks the blood of the living, is the quintessential horror villain. And in true undead style, he holds up well—he’s as creepy today as he was when Stoker invented him in 1897. Here’s what you need to know about the character and the novel.

As was apparently common among Victorian Gothic fiction, Dracula supposedly came from a nightmare … one possibly caused by bad seafood. According to biographer Harry Ludlam, Stoker said he was compelled to pen the tale after dreaming of “a vampire king rising from the tomb”—following a “helping of dressed crab at supper.” While the fare might not have actually had anything to do with what he dreamt that night, Stoker’s private working notes show him revisiting the frightening vision. In March 1890, he wrote, “young man goes out—sees girls. One tries to kiss him not on the lips but throat. Old Count interferes—rage and fury diabolical. ‘This man belongs to me. I want him.’” Whether this is the actual nightmare or the beginning of Jonathan Harker’s story is unclear, but Stoker returned to the dream repeatedly while writing the book.

In 1816, on a gloomy day in Lake Geneva, Lord Byron proposed a ghost story contest that led to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein. It also led (in a convulted way) to the birth of The Vampyre by John Polidori, which gave us the modern vampire. Polidori was Byron’s personal physician and he may have based his aristocratic bloodsucker on his patient. In any case, The Vampyre influenced Varney the Vampire, a popular penny dreadful from the 1840s, as well as Carmilla, a novella about a lesbian vampire from the 1870s, and, of course, Stoker.

Stoker began Dracula in 1890, two years after Jack the Ripper terrorized London. The lurid atmosphere these crimes produced made their way into Stoker’s novel, which was confirmed in the 1901 preface to the Icelandic edition of Dracula. Stoker’s reference links the two frightening figures in such a way that raises more questions than provides answers, but no doubt confirms the terrifying real-life influence on his fictional world.

Stoker’s boss of almost 30 years was Henry Irving, a renowned Shakespearean actor and owner of the Lyceum Theatre in London. Stoker was Irving’s business manager, press agent, and secretary. Like the Hollywood assistant of today, his job started early and ended late, with a lot of ego boosting in between. Some critics have suggested that the charismatic Irving was the basis for Dracula. In a review of A Biography of the Author of Dracula by Barbara Belford in the Chicago Tribune, Penelope Mesic wrote:

“Here, Belford suggests, was the aristocratic, tall, flamboyant, mesmerizing figure with the smoldering eyes and elegant long hands whose egotism and allure were transplanted by Stoker into the sexually ambiguous figure who could drain the life out of those around him and yet exert a fascination that made the soul-destroying experience pleasurable.”

Whether or not it was inspired by him, Irving didn’t like Dracula. After seeing a performance of the story, Stoker asked Irving what he thought. Irving would only reply, “Dreadful!”

Some believe that Stoker modeled Dracula in part on a Wallachian (now part of Romania) voivode (in this context usually taken to mean “prince”) named Vlad Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler, who was known for skewering his enemies. Scholars disagree about how much Stoker knew about Vlad, with some insisting that there’s no proof he modeled Dracula on the vengeful prince. What we do know from Stoker’s working notes is that he read a book titled An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia by William Wilkinson. The book mentions a couple of leaders named “Dracula,” including Vlad the Impaler (though not specifically by that name), and how one of them attacked Turkish troops. Inspired, Stoker changed the vampire’s name from Count Wampyr to Dracula, copying from a footnote: “DRACULA in Wallachian language means DEVIL” (emphasis Stoker’s).

Although Stoker set his book in Transylvania, he never visited the country. Instead, he researched the setting as best he could and imagined the rest. Most of his Victorian readers didn’t know the difference, especially since he added details from travel books, including train timetables, hotel names, and a chicken dish called paprika hendl.

Stoker did visit the seaside village of Whitby, however, and it provided plenty of inspiration for his tale.

Many critics believe that Stoker used Slains Castle in Scotland as the model for Dracula’s home. Stoker spent many summers in nearby Cruden Bay and was familiar with the surrounding sites, including these castle ruins on a hill. He was even staying in the area when he wrote his description of “a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the sky.”

In Dracula, vampire Lucy is killed by her suitor when he opens her coffin and stakes her in the heart. Stoker may have borrowed this from the experience of his neighbor, poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (who, incidentally, was the nephew of John Polidori). When Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddal died in 1862, Rossetti put a journal of love poems in her coffin, winding it romantically in her red hair. Then, in 1869, he changed his mind and the coffin was raised in the middle of the night so he could retrieve the book. The grisly exhumation (some of Siddal’s hair came away in Rossetti’s hands) may have been on Stoker’s mind when he wrote Lucy’s final end.

The working title of the novel was The Dead Un-dead, which was later shortened to The Un-dead. Then, right before it was published, Stoker changed the title once more to Dracula. What’s in a name? Well, it’s tough to say. Upon release, Dracula got good reviews, but the sales were nothing spectacular, and by the end of his life, Stoker was so poor that he had to ask for a compassionate grant from the Royal Literary Fund. The Gothic tale didn’t become the legend it is today until stage and screen adaptations began popping up during the 20th century.

While Dracula wasn’t an instant hit, Stoker held onto the theatrical copyright. After his death in 1922, a German film company made the now classic Nosferatu, for which they changed the names of the characters, but still didn’t get permission to use the story. Stoker’s widow sued and a German court ordered that every copy of the film be destroyed. Luckily for us, one survived. Eventually, it made its way to the United States and developed a cult following. Today, it’s thought of as one of the definitive pieces of horror cinema.

The movies are what really made Dracula a star. He has appeared in more films than any other horror character (more than 250 and counting), and that number doesn’t even include comedies and cartoons.

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

Does trying to calculate a tip without your smartphone calculator make you break out in a cold sweat? If you answered “yes,” you’re in good company. Even the most brilliant scientists and engineers have had trouble crunching numbers—and here are just a few of them.

Michael Faraday, born in 1791 as the son of a blacksmith, is considered the “father of electricity.” Faraday built the first electric motor and the first electric generator. He also invented the rubber balloon, laid the groundwork for refrigeration technology, and demonstrated Earth’s magnetic field.

Despite his accomplishments, Faraday was self-conscious about having little formal education. His math skills left a lot to be desired. In 1846, he correctly proposed that visible light was a form of electromagnetic radiation, but because he couldn’t back it up with mathematical evidence, his colleagues ignored him. Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell later devised the equations to support Faraday’s theory 18 years later.

Charles Darwin loathed math. While a student at the University of Cambridge, “I attempted mathematics,” Darwin wrote in his autobiography, “but I got on very slowly.” Instructions from a tutor during the summer of 1828 did not improve his skills:

“The work was repugnant to me,” he wrote, “chiefly from my not being able to see any meaning in the early steps in algebra. This impatience was very foolish, and in after years I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principals of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.”

In high school, Alexander Graham Bell had a love-hate relationship with math. According to biographer Robert V. Bruce, the Scottish-born educator and inventor of the telephone “enjoyed the intellectual exercise” of this subject, but was “bored and hence careless in working out the final answer once he learned the method.” His grades suffered accordingly. Bell’s mathematical aptitude never equaled that of his scientific peers.

As a student, Edison trudged through Isaac Newton’s foundational Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which left him with nothing but “a distaste for mathematics from which I never recovered.”

Edison knew almost nothing of higher math and relied on the numerical genius of Charles Proteus Steinmetz to devise the mathematical underpinnings of Edison’s General Electric Company. Steinmetz oversaw much of G.E.’s technical product development from upstate New York, leading colleagues to call him the “wizard of Schenectady.” Edison also recruited Francis Upton to make calculations that could help him carry out various lab experiments, including those on the incandescent lamp and the watt-hour meter. “I can always hire a mathematician,” Edison once said, “[but] they can’t hire me.”

In the 1970’s, Jack Horner discovered the Western Hemisphere’s first known dinosaur eggs, changing our understanding of how the prehistoric lizards lived and raised their young.

Horner’s success in paleontology must have shocked his elementary school teachers. The Montana native found classes “extremely difficult because my progress in reading, writing, and mathematics was excruciatingly slow.” Horner would go on to flunk college courses and never graduated, throwing a wrench into his employment options. Horner eventually began writing “to every museum in the English-speaking world asking if they had any jobs open for anyone ranging from a technician to a director.”

The reason behind his educational struggle became clear in 1979 when Horner was diagnosed with dyslexia. “To this day, I struggle with the side effects,” he said. “Self-paced learning is a strategy that helps me cope. Audio books are also a very helpful technology.”

In his 2013 book Letters to a Young Scientist, naturalist E.O. Wilson revealed a tumultuous personal history with math.

Wilson admitted that he “didn’t take algebra until my freshman year at the University of Alabama … I finally got around to calculus as a 32-year-old tenured professor at Harvard, where I sat uncomfortably in classes with undergraduate students only a bit more than half my age. A couple of them were students in a course on evolutionary biology I was teaching. I swallowed my pride and learned calculus.” While playing catch-up, he was “never more than a C student.”

For numerophobic science majors, Wilson offered this tip: “The longer you wait to become at least semiliterate in math, the harder the language of mathematics will be to master … But it can be done, and at any age.”

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

In 1996, The X-Files released what would become one of its most notorious episodes. Inconspicuously titled “Home,” it follows paranormal detectives Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) as they investigate the murder of an unidentified baby on the outskirts of a small Pennsylvania town. Their search quickly leads them to the Peacocks, a family of three deformed brothers, who appear to live alone on a farm, cut off from the rest of the world. Eventually, Mulder and Scully discover the brothers’ horrifying secret: their quadruple amputee mother, who was previously presumed dead, is responsible for giving birth to the murdered child.

Today, “Home” is remembered as one of the most disturbing episodes of The X-Files—and of television—of all time. “We got in big trouble for that,” episode co-writer would later James Wong recall. “I remember it was really quite controversial, even though we didn’t think that at the time we wrote it.” Fox even promised to never air “Home” again after receiving complaints that it was “tasteless.”

For fans, however, the episode was a favorite. But what many viewers on either side of the argument might not know is that it was partially inspired by a truly surprising source: Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography. 

Chaplin, who grew up poor in London, got his first big break playing a small part in a British theatrical production of Sherlock Holmes. The teenaged Chaplin toured the countryside with the theater troupe, and would seek out the cheapest lodging during his stay in each town. In My Autobiography, Chaplin described a particularly strange stay at a miner’s house in a “dank, ugly” town called Ebbw Vale in Wales.

One night, after dinner, Chaplin’s host led him into the kitchen, announcing he had something to show the young actor. From a kitchen cupboard—where he was evidently sleeping—out crawled a man with no legs who, at the miner’s goading, began performing a series of strange tricks and dances. In the book, Chaplin recalled:

“A half man with no legs, an oversized, blond, flat-shaped head, a sickening white face, a sunken nose, a large mouth and powerful muscular shoulders and arms, crawled from underneath the dresser … ‘Hey, Gilbert, jump!’ said the father and the wretched man lowered himself slowly, then shot up by his arms almost to the height of my head. ‘How do you think he’d fit in with a circus? The human frog!’

I was so horrified I could hardly answer. However, I suggested the names of several circuses that he might write to.”

The incident shocked Chaplin—and its retelling apparently had a strong impact on The X-Files writer Glen Morgan as well. According to Morgan, who co-wrote the episode with Wong, Chaplin’s story came back to him while he was writing “Home.”

Though Morgan misremembered the anecdote slightly—he recalled the man being totally limbless, and that the family members “[stood] him up and start[ed] singing and dancing, and the kid kind of flop[ped] around”—the general image stuck with him for a long time. “I think I read that like 13 years ago, and ever since then I thought, ‘God, I gotta do something like that!,’” Morgan later explained. 

So he modeled the mother of the Peacock brothers on the legless man under the dresser. Hidden under a bed for most of the episode, Mama Peacock served as the final twist in one of The X-Files’ most controversial episodes.

You can see co-writer Wong discussing the episode—and Chaplin’s influence on it—in the video below.

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

Nearly 50 years after its debut, there’s still never been a television series quite like Dark Shadows. The ABC daytime soap opera, which aired from 1966 to 1971, was a charmingly under-budgeted Gothic melodrama about a spooky seaside town in Maine that blended the supernatural (werewolves, witchcraft, and zombies) with parallel universes and time travel; angst-ridden vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) emerged as the show’s breakout star. General Hospital it wasn’t.

Usually airing in late afternoons, Dark Shadows acquired a large teenage fanbase, with some of its frilly-collared actors appearing in the pages of Tiger Beat, and an even larger cult following. If this all sounds peculiar, you don’t know the half of it. Take a look at the show’s humble special effects attempts, Frid’s forced dates, and how Joseph Gordon-Levitt figures into all of this.  

Creator Dan Curtis—who would later conceive of The X-Files predecessor Kolchak: The Night Stalker and the classic TV movie Trilogy of Terror—originally had in mind a dramatic series about the strange residents of Collinsport, Maine, as viewed from the perspective of newly-arrived governess Victoria Winters. Though mystical elements—like ghosts—were present, they were subtle and slow to materialize. When the show premiered June 27, 1966, viewers found its characters as impenetrable as Winters did; Variety called it a “yawn.”

Hoping to improve ratings with a classic horror movie trope—a vampire—Curtis introduced Collins, a brooding bloodsucker tortured by his condition. Originally intended to be a fleeting character who would be staked in the heart after a three-week run, he became so popular with viewers (ratings saw a 62 percent increase) that the show was saved from the guillotine.

With a roughly $70,000 budget to shoot its five weekly episodes, Dark Shadows had to approach its special effects conservatively. Camera operator Stuart Goodman found that covering his lens with plastic wrap and then dabbing Vaseline at the edges to create a hazy, dreamlike visual was surprisingly effective. To emulate actors being trapped in a blaze, Goodman would simply put a bucket in front of himself and light it on fire.

Despite its lofty ambitions, sprawling stories and camera tricks, Dark Shadows had to maintain a standard soap schedule that allowed episodes to air daily. Because of the compressed production, actor flubs, focus mistakes, and other gaffes that would normally be re-shot had to remain in the show. Viewers would occasionally see performers read the wrong lines or see a crew member wander into shots. Actress Kate Jackson was wearing a dress that caught fire by accident: She finished her scene before being put out. Most notably, Frid was caught picking his nose when he thought he was off-camera.

Despite his questionable manners, Frid quickly became the Robert Pattinson of his day. (In his early 40s and uncomfortable in front of cameras, Frid never expected to find himself the subject of viewer crushes. Too bad a tragic vampire is irresistible.) He was bombarded with requests for personal appearances. He was once invited to a Halloween party at the White House (in character) and judged a Miss American Vampire beauty contest, with the winner earning a small role in the show. Poor Frid was also subject to promotional stunts like magazines promising a date with him. “Yes, ladies,” read TV Radio Talk copy, “finally, your fondest nightmares can come true … you will indulge in a long, eerie candlelit dinner at one of the city’s finer haunts, escorted by none other than … that delicious vampire.”   

No one on Dark Shadows had any illusions that the show’s camp nature, on-the-nose dialogue, and suspect production values were elevating television. Frid was especially candid about its shortcomings. “It’s the worst acting I’ve ever done,” he told The Montreal Gazette in 1969. “I blink too much, I’m not sharp or fast enough, I don’t have enough time to learn my lines … I can’t get angry with people who find the whole thing ridiculous because the scripts are ridiculous, the dialogue is absurd.”

Dampened vocally by the fangs he had to wear, Frid also told the Gazette of some production trickery: Collins was rarely filmed talking in them. “My words come out slushy when I wear them, so they have to cut away from me when I talk,” he said. Frid would spit out the fangs, deliver the dialogue, then stuff them back in when the camera returned to him.

Though soaps had experimented with color before, Dark Shadows became the first daytime serial on ABC to switch to the format in 1967. (It had spent its first year in black and white.)

With an unforgiving daily schedule, Dark Shadows produced 1225 episodes during its five-year run. Incredibly, 1224 of them survived. Episode 1219 was discovered to be “missing” when a home video release was being put together. To reconstruct it, an audio recording from a fan was used along with production stills.   

The daily percussion of intricate stories involving monsters and alternate universes eventually wore on both audiences and creators: Curtis wished to move on from the show and was unwilling to cede control to another producer, and ABC was less than satisfied with declining ratings. Dark Shadows ended on April 2, 1971, and was replaced with a new version of the game show Password.

It’s a testament to Dark Shadows‘ rabid following that the series birthed two feature films with the original cast—virtually unheard of for a soap opera of any era. Curtis directed 1970’s House of Dark Shadows, which covered much of the same ground as the series but morphed Collins into more of an antagonist. While a feature budget meant actors actually had the privilege of doing more than one take, reviews were mixed.

After the series ended in 1971, Curtis wanted to continue the story with another film. Night of Dark Shadows was released that same year, but Frid declined to participate. Curtis opted for more of a haunted house theme instead, with the show’s cast popping up in different roles. It’s been alleged MGM cut 30 minutes from the finished film, obliterating some plot and character details. In its released form, reviewers found it “dull,” “monotonous,” and “a bore.” (Tim Burton’s 2012 feature, starring Johnny Depp as Collins, didn’t fare much better.)

Having been largely dormant since going off the air, Dark Shadows was reintroduced to a contemporary audience in 1991. NBC ordered 13 episodes of the series that revived Barnabas (now portrayed by Ben Cross) and rebooted the spooky history of Collinwood Mansion. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, all of 10 years old, played David Collins. Ratings were modest, and the intensifying Gulf War only worsened viewership. The WB tried again in 2004, but the pilot never made it to air. It’s sometimes screened at fan conventions.

Unlike most daytime soaps, the genre elements of Dark Shadows lent themselves to a variety of merchandising opportunities. Model kits, novels, and toys were in abundance. The series was also adapted into another serialized format: a comic strip ran from 1971 to 1972. Though it effectively picked up the property after the show had ended, it bore little relation. Of the characters, only Frid’s Barnabas was recognizable.   

In a nod to Curtis’s two most popular fantasy series, Moonstone Publishing issued a Dark Shadows/Kolchak crossover comic book in 2009. Kolchak—a newspaper reporter with an affinity for supernatural cases—receives a letter from Barnabas inviting him to the opulent Collinwood Mansion. After Kolchak tries to murder him, the two have a friendly chat. Fans hoping for more of a confrontation were slightly disappointed.

VCR enthusiasts of the 1980s will recall that Time-Life, Columbia House, and other videotape distributors would offer television series in their entirety, provided collectors had the money and shelf space to accommodate them. While this was a tricky enterprise even with a short-lived series like 1966’s Star Trek, it was almost unfathomable for Dark Shadows. Airing every weekday for five seasons, the series amassed 1225 half-hour episodes, which meant the entire library from video rights holder MPI needed a staggering 254 cassettes. In 2012, the company released it on DVD in a coffin-shaped collector’s case. It was a paltry 131 discs.

Despite what some cartoons and amusement park rides may have led you to believe, pirates were generally not a charming lot. They pillaged, they invaded, and they obeyed only the sea laws they made up as they went along. For proof, check out these 12 real ocean marauders and the waters they terrorized.

Edward “Blackbeard” Teach’s exploits were nothing to sneeze at. Fond of arming himself to the teeth, he customized a stolen French ship in 1717 to include 40 cannons and then used it to threaten the port of Charleston, South Carolina, refusing to move until his extortionate demands were met. He wasn’t above petty larceny, either: When a man refused to hand over his ring, Blackbeard took the jewelry and the finger. It took the British Navy to finally bring him down.

Charles Vane steered his ship Ranger into lots of trouble in the early 1700s—enough to grab the attention of newly appointed Royal Governor Woodes Rogers in New Providence in the Bahamas. After Vane snubbed Rogers’s offer of a pardon, the two forces engaged in what amounted to an oceanic dogfight. Vane set one of his own ships on fire and aimed it at his enemies. As Woodes’s forces frantically steered out of its path, Vane sailed around them to freedom.  His cunning didn’t last, though: Captured in the 1720s, he was hanged for his crimes.

Anne Bonny didn’t subscribe to gender roles. When one man complained of her presence on a ship—thought to be an unlucky omen—she stabbed him. Legend says Bonny met Mary Read after Bonny’s ship (captained by her paramour, “Calico Jack” Rackam) had seized Mary’s; the two became close, fighting together as Bonny’s pirate crew stormed fishing boats. When their ship was taken over by Jamaican forces in 1720, the men hid below deck while the women stood their ground. After being sentenced to hang, they got stays of execution after it was found both were pregnant.

Welsh pirate Bartholomew Roberts was one of the most successful (or feared, depending on your vantage point) buccaneers of piracy’s golden age. In one instance, Roberts pretended to be part of a Brazilian fleet so he could get close enough to pillage its richest ship. Roberts’s disposition was occasionally challenged by his crew, to which Roberts would typically answer by murdering them. Roberts was ultimately killed by the British Navy in 1722.

Any pretense of British-born pirates being slightly more humane than their counterparts was abandoned as stories of Edward Low began to spread in the early 1700s. Sailing along North America and the Caribbean, Low seemed to enjoy tormenting his captured and frightened crews. His sadism grew intolerable, and the final straw came when he abandoned his sister ship and all its crew to a British vessel that he could have defeated. His crew eventually abandoned him, and some accounts say he was hanged in France, while others say he escaped with his life to Brazil.

While many pirates had a reputation for brutality, L’Olonnais was in a (violent) class by himself. He terrorized the Caribbean in the 1600s and he was fond of dismembering foes—in one instance, even taking a bite of a man’s heart. Some historians believe L’Olonnais was himself eaten by cannibals.

Dutch pirate Compaen achieved folk hero status for his maritime exploits. As many as 350 ships were victimized by his aggression, and it’s believed that Compaen protected his bounty by bribing European authorities in exchange for safe harbor. Even after Compaen had hung up his captain’s hat and settled in Holland, parents would sometimes caution their children to behave—or else they’d call Compaen, their boogeyman, to come after them.

Also known as Ching Shih, the Chinese widow took over her husband’s impressive fleet of pirate ships in the early 1800s. But her leadership came with conditions: no female captive could be harmed. Pirates were allowed to purchase the prettiest captives as wives, but if the pirates cheated, they’d be put to death. Privateers who didn’t show up for work or deserted the fleet had their ears removed. Zheng Yi Sao later ran a gambling house.

It’s not often that love makes a man turn to a life of pirate crime, but Sam Bellamy was no ordinary looter: Cape Cod lore says that after being rejected by the parents of his love, “Maria,” for being poor, Bellamy took to the seas to find his fortune. He ended up capturing the Whydah, a ship stuffed with gold and silver after it had delivered its cargo of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean. No lifetime criminal, Bellamy had gathered enough booty to steer home in 1717—and was promptly caught in a storm that killed him before he could prove his worth. Part of the wreckage of the Whydah was discovered in the latter part of the 20th century, making it the first pirate ship from piracy’s golden age ever recovered in North America. 

Rhode Island-born Charles Gibbs was active during the last wave of piracy in the early 1800s. Once he was captured and standing trial, Gibbs’s practice of killing most of his seized ship’s crews ignited debate over capital punishment: He murdered most witnesses, he said, since murder and piracy both carried the same punishment (death) and also because “dead men tell no tales.” He was hanged for his crimes in 1831 at Ellis Island.

Henry Avery (also known as John Every), whose cruelty was considered excessive even by pirate standards, stormed the Atlantic and Indian oceans in the late 1600s. His greed was legendary: When the volume of gold and silver on board the Indian treasure ship Ganj-i-Sawai wasn’t enough to satisfy his appetite, Avery is said to have ordered his men to torture passengers to make sure no more valuables were hidden. When he was satisfied he had squeezed them for every ounce, he threw their bodies overboard. Avery was last seen with a hoard of money, but how he was able to spend it without being identified is lost to history.

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

The Great Peshtigo Fire erupted on October 8, 1871, devastating 1.2 million acres of land and killing more than 2500 people in northern Wisconsin and Michigan. That’s more deaths by fire from a single incident than any other in the United States. And in one of the most unfortunate coincidences in American history, it happened on the same night as a better-known, yet much smaller, fire—the Great Chicago Fire, which ravaged 3.3 square miles of land and killed 300.

With today’s technology and early warning systems, it’s hard to imagine how a fire could take so many lives. But in 1871, the small town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, didn’t have the hoses and pumps required to fight a fire of such great magnitude. Surrounded by burning forest, the townspeople became trapped in a city of wooden buildings, wooden sidewalks, and streets covered in sawdust. After scorching an area more than twice the size of Rhode Island, the fire died down only when it finally reached the waters of Green Bay and rain began to fall.

Though the effects were widespread (with more than 12 communities affected), the tragedy eventually took on the name Peshtigo because that town suffered the worst—approximately 800 people, about half of its population perished that night. Many victims were burned so badly that they were unidentifiable. Three hundred and fifty of these men, women, and children are buried in a mass grave at the Peshtigo Fire Cemetery.

The Peshtigo and Chicago fires weren’t the only infernos that raged that day. The Great Michigan Fire also started on October 8, 1871, leading some to believe that there was a central source for all three fires—namely, a comet passing over the Midwest, spraying hot debris in its wake. The problem with that idea is that meteorites aren’t hot by the time they get to Earth. A more likely scenario is that all three fires were caused by dry weather conditions and strong winds across the region. 

The Lumière brothers were said to have caused quite a stir when their 50-second short film, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, premiered in Paris in 1896. Audiences, who were unaccustomed to the sensory experience of moving footage, experienced a jolt of panic when an oncoming train seemed to be speeding directly toward them.

Over the years, the story has morphed into people fleeing from the theater entirely, though that’s not likely. Since the Lumières, however, many filmmakers have been successful in driving moviegoers out of their seats. The latest additions: Presence, a Steven Soderbergh film about a ghostly apparition that’s apparently too tense for some filmgoers. A Variety journalist observed at least two quick exits at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, including one who said, “I cannot take this stress so late at night.”

Another Sundance audience displeaser: Sasquatch Sunset, which apparently depicts the monster of folklore moving his bowels. Twelve members of the press exited within the first half-hour.

Here are eight other films that couldn’t keep audiences in the dark for long.

Lines wrapped around the block for the film adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s bestselling novel about a young girl possessed by a demon. They quickly realized it was the cinematic equivalent of a hot pepper: something to be endured rather than enjoyed. News footage portrayed stricken filmgoers who had fled screening rooms out of sheer terror; one fainted in the lobby. “I just found it really horrible and had to come out,” said one audience member. “I couldn’t take it anymore.” By the time the film premiered in London, ambulances were parked outside.

Launching the found-footage genre with an economical story about filmmakers threatened by an unseen supernatural force, The Blair Witch Project was a sizable box office hit and remains one of the most profitable films ever ($22,000 budget, $240 million gross). But the documentary-style format, with actors jogging or falling over with a camera in hand, prompted waves of people getting motion sickness in aisles, lobbies, and bathrooms. Atlanta-area theaters were reported on puke patrol for most of opening weekend. “Someone threw up in the men’s restroom, the women’s restroom, and in the hallway,” said a theater manager. “It’s not pleasant to clean up.” In Cambridge, Massachusetts, another theater manager made announcements before screenings to please vomit outside of the screening room.

By the time Cloverfield‘s (2008) handheld photography was churning stomachs a decade later, theaters wisely posted signs warning of a “roller coaster” effect. Instead of barf bags, theaters handed out refunds.

From the get-what-you-pay-for department: Audiences that streamed in for director Danny Boyle’s account of hiker Aron Ralston, who got himself wedged in a cave and had to amputate his own arm with a pocketknife, found themselves bearing witness to James Franco wedged in a cave and amputating his own arm with a pocketknife. Many, many people fainted; some vomited; one person fainted, was hauled away in an ambulance, and returned to the theater to declare the film “excellent.”

It’s not necessarily shocking that the unflinching violence of a Quentin Tarantino movie would prompt audience evacuations: 1994’s Pulp Fiction lost patrons when Uma Thurman got a shot of adrenaline in her heart. But Reservoir Dogs is notable for the people it pulled from their seats. When Michael Madsen’s character began an unsolicited ear amputation of a hostage during an industry screening, the late Wes Craven (creator of The Last House on the Left and A Nightmare on Elm Street) reportedly fled the theater.  

Tod Browning’s infamous portrayal of a circus sideshow with revenge in mind was a harrowing experience for filmgoers. Not strictly a horror film, its large cast of “actual” circus performers was unsettling. Freaks suffered mass walkouts upon release, as viewers were unnerved by missing limbs; MGM insisted on editing the film after a woman claimed she was so aggrieved during a screening that she suffered a miscarriage.  

Panned for its depiction of a brutal assault, this revenge film from director Gaspar Noé prompted viewers to head for the exits—but not necessarily because of what was shown onscreen. Noé admitted to using a 27 hertz frequency of bass that can’t be picked up by the human ear during the movie’s first 30 minutes. Known as infrasound, it’s been known to induce panic and anxiety in a manner similar to vibrations created by earthquakes. Paranormal Activity (2007) used a similar technique.

In the proud Disney tradition of maiming parents came The Lion King, where tiny Simba learns to fend for himself after his father is trampled during a stampede. The animated tragedy proved so intense for younger viewers—Disney’s key demographic—that they had to be temporarily relocated to the lobby until they calmed down.  

In the 2008 documentary Man on Wire, modern audiences met Philippe Petit, a rope walker who caused a stir in 1974 New York for traipsing between the Twin Towers. In 2015, director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future) dramatized the feat with The Walk, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit. Unlike the documentary, which relied mainly on still photos and reenactments, Zemeckis used digital artistry to put the viewer on the rope with Petit—in IMAX, no less. The result was so dizzying that audience members prone to vertigo suffered anxiety and even vomiting.

A version of this article was originally published in 2015; it has been updated for 2024.

If you’ve ever been to a funeral (or behind the procession of one on the road), you’ve probably seen a hearse—and perhaps you’ve noticed that the vehicle usually doesn’t have windows in the back. Instead, there are S-shaped bars where the windows should be. What gives?

Those diagonal irons on the rear quarter panel of hearses are called “landau bars.” They’re purely decorative today, but they once served a purpose and are now in place as a nod to history.

The landau carriage was invented in the mid-18th century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, they got their name from “a town in Germany where the vehicle was first made. The German name is landauer, short for landauer wagen.”

Lightweight and suspended on elliptical springs, this four-in-hand coach was a precursor to today’s convertible cars in that it had a collapsible roof. The soft folding top on the original model was divided into two sections, front and rear, which were latched in the center. An elongated external hinge mechanism was necessary to support the folding roof, and since the pricey landau was designed as a luxury vehicle for the upper classes, designers added the elegant S-shaped scroll to the utilitarian hinges to make them more aesthetically appealing.

Early horse-drawn hearses were carriages that often featured fully functional landau bars. Before World War II, American automobile hearses borrowed the landau bar flourish as an homage and an attempt to add a touch of Old-World “class.” Over the years the landau bars became so ingrained in the public’s mind as a symbol of a funeral car that most hearse manufacturers still tack them onto their limousines as a matter of tradition.

By the way, don’t be surprised if you hear a funeral director use the word coach rather than hearse to refer to the vehicle transporting a casket—as Jessica Mitford wrote in The American Way of Death Revisited, this was just one change to funeral-related language in the 20th century. Other terms that got phased out were morgue (the suggested replacement was preparation room) and undertaker (replaced by funeral director or mortician).

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

They may not be able to jump those turnstiles like they could decades ago, but that didn’t stop The Warriors from coming out to pla-ay. In 2015, several members of the fictional Coney Island gang that somehow inspired real-life violence in the summer of 1979 reunited to recreate their iconic subway ride home to Brooklyn as part of a fan-organized event.

Rolling Stone took a ride on the Q with most of the gang’s original members, including Michael Beck (Swan), Dorsey Wright (Cleon), Terry Michos (Vermin), David Harris (Cochise), and Thomas G. Waites (Fox) to witness history in the remaking. The reunion did not go unnoticed by fellow straphangers.

The stakes weren’t nearly as high this time around, as The Warriors already knew the ending. Though in this case, they were met by enthusiastic fans upon their arrival in Coney Island (some from as far away as Scotland) not a gun-toting Luther and the rest of the Rogues.

“I just love being here with all the fans,” Beck told Rolling Stone. “I see kids coming here, eight years old, and I go ‘How do you even know about this movie?’”

Kids: They can dig it.

[h/t Rolling Stone]

The Grapes of Wrath is John Steinbeck’s award-winning political novel about the Great Depression. It follows the Joad family as they’re forced to leave their Oklahoma farm and go west to California for work. The book, which was released on April 14, 1939, humanized the “Okies,” captured history as it was happening, and earned its author so much personal trouble that he started carrying a gun for protection. Find out more about the classic below.

In 1936, the San Francisco News hired Steinbeck to write a series of articles about migrant labor camps in California. The articles, which you can read here, were later reprinted in a pamphlet along with Dorothea Lange’s iconic photographs. In the pieces, Steinbeck described Americans living in filthy shacks without running water and suffering from malnutrition, illness, and death. He used much of what he saw in The Grapes of Wrath.

The author dedicated The Grapes of Wrath to Tom Collins, who managed the Migratory Labor Camp in Kern County, California, and helped Steinbeck research the novel. “I need this stuff,” Steinbeck wrote of the detailed reports Collins gave him about the camps. “It is exact and just the thing that will be used against me if I’m wrong.” But Steinbeck didn’t know that another writer, Sanora Babb, had written the reports and was using them as the foundation for her own novel, Whose Names Are Unknown. It was going to be published by Random House when The Grapes Of Wrath hit the bestseller list. Steinbeck’s novel upstaged Babb and her book was shelved until she finally published her work in 2004, the year before she died.

Steinbeck grew up in Salinas, California, a farming community that was politically divided between workers and agricultural landowners. Although born into the middle class, Steinbeck sympathized with the workingman and worked on a sugar beet farm as a young man. (He used to pay workers a quarter to tell him their life stories, which sometimes made it into his fiction.) At the time Steinbeck was writing about the labor camps, the Salinas Lettuce Strike broke out when tension between workers who wanted to unionize, landowners, and the police erupted in violence in the streets.

While writing The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck kept a journal of his process. The account shows the emotional ups and downs of an intense writing experience: Steinbeck knew he was writing something that could be potentially great, but he doubted his ability to do it. “This book has become a misery to me because of my inadequacy,” the journal reads. He seemed to find writing not only mentally difficult, but hard on the nerves. “My stomach and my nerves are screaming merry hell in protest against the inroads,” he wrote. And again later, “And now home with a little stomach ache that doesn’t come from the stomach.” For more, here’s a podcast of an actor reading from the journal.

Steinbeck’s wife, Carol, thought of taking The Grapes of Wrath from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord/He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” The poem—later a song—was written by Julia Ward Howe in 1861. She got “grapes of wrath” from Revelation 14:19 in the Bible. In choosing the title, Steinbeck was emphasizing that the book was American, not Communist propaganda, as he knew it would be called.

The novel was critically acclaimed and a bestseller—some 430,000 copies had been printed by February 1940. But it was also controversial. The Associated Farmers of California was angered by the book, which implied that they used the migrants for cheap labor. They called The Grapes of Wrath a “pack of lies” and launched an attack against it, publicly burning the work and calling it communist. Other institutions banned the book because of profanity and because of the ending, when a woman breastfeeds a starving man.

Steinbeck encountered so much hostility after The Grapes of Wrath came out that he considered giving up writing altogether. Articles in the press, buoyed by the Associated Farmers of California, launched a “hysterical personal attack” on Steinbeck. “I’m a pervert, a drunk, a dope fiend,” he wrote. For a time, the FBI put him under surveillance. In Salinas, people he knew his entire life became unfriendly toward him. He received death threats and was advised by the Monterey County Sheriff to carry a gun. Steinbeck complied. His son Thomas Steinbeck said, “My father was the best-armed man I knew, and went most places armed.”

While the book did well on its own, the 1940 movie cemented The Grapes of Wrath as a classic. Directed by John Ford, it starred Henry Fonda as Tom Joad. Steinbeck reportedly liked Fonda’s performance, saying it made him “believe my own words.” Ford won an Oscar for Best Director and Jane Darwell won Best Supporting Actress as Ma Joad.

When the movie came out, Victor Records asked Woody Guthrie to write 12 songs about the Dust Bowl for an album called Dust Bowl Ballads. One song was supposed to be based on the movie. So Guthrie borrowed a friend’s typewriter, sat down with a jug of wine, and typed out the lyrics to “Tom Joad.”

In the book, Steinbeck writes about Route 66, the 2500-mile road between Chicago and Los Angeles, which used to be a major artery in the United States: “66 is the mother road, the road of flight,” he said. Since then, the “Mother Road” has been portrayed in everything from Bobby Troup’s song “Route 66” to Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road.

The Grapes of Wrath won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and was a major factor for Steinbeck winning the Nobel Prize in 1962. “In my heart there may be doubt that I deserve the Nobel award over other men of letters whom I hold in respect and reverence—but there is no question of my pleasure and pride in having it for myself,” Steinbeck said in his speech, which you can watch above.

Rather than “offer[ing] personal or scholarly comment on the nature and the direction of literature,” Steinbeck chose “to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literature,” saying:

“[T]he understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer’s reason for being. … He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement. Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat—for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.”

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

What did Chicago look like at the turn of the last century? Yestervid, a video series showcasing film compilations, answered that question by dredging up some of the oldest footage of the Windy City known to exist. The scenes in this five-minute-long video showcase the lakeshore, city streets, stockyards, baseball games, and more circa the early 1900s. Spoiler: There were a lot more cows. 

A handy split-screen with a map pinpoints the approximate location and date of the footage, a useful tool for anyone who wants to compare their own visuals of Chicago to the urban views from yesteryear. While most of the footage comes from around 1915, there’s also an audio recording from way back in 1893.

The video features footage from the aftermath of the Eastland disaster, which occurred on July 24, 1915. Employees of the Western Electric Company boarded the SS Eastland for the company’s annual picnic; the passenger liner—which had a reputation for being unstable—began listing and was righted several times before ultimately capsizing, killing 844 people. According to Britannica, “hundreds more lives were lost in the Eastland disaster than in the Chicago fire of 1871.” In another part of the video, you’ll spot former president Theodore Roosevelt riding through the city in 1917 (he was there to urge military preparedness in the face of World War I) and notorious gangster Al Capone in 1931.

To add to the list of discoveries, the producers believe they have identified the location of the oldest surviving film of the city, a few shots of a police parade from 1896. The building in that film has been demolished, but Yestervid pinpoints the location as the corner of Michigan Avenue and Monroe Street downtown.

Check out the footage above—and if you can’t get enough of videos from eras past, watch this footage of New York City in the 1970s and this colorized video of life in Victorian England.

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

Faking your own death is not in and of itself illegal. If you wanted to walk away from your life and start anew, there are no federal statutes to prevent you from doing so—but it’s rarely the best solution to your problems. Sometimes people who commit pseudocide, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey, are trying to evade capture for a crime. Others disappear purely for financial reasons, like businessman Jose Lantigua and Igor Vorotinov, the latter of whom did it as part of an insurance scheme.

Some stories of staged deaths are even more complex, from the man who faked his death to gauge his popularity to the man who testified at the trial of his alleged murderers. Here are some of the more unusual cases of pseudocide over the past 500 years.

According to legend, Jacquotte Delahaye’s mother died in childbirth and her father was murdered during her youth, so she turned to piracy to provide for herself and her younger, mentally disabled brother.

At one point during her reign as pirate queen, Delahaye was captured and forced to fake her death to escape. She lived in hiding as a man for a number of years, after which she reunited with her crew and returned to piracy. She and her crew even went on to claim a whole Caribbean island as their own. Not only was Delahaye a successful pirate, but she had one of the best sea-faring monikers around, thanks to her staged death and auburn hair: “Back from the Dead Red.”

Timothy Dexter is regarded as one of America’s first famous eccentrics, and with good reason. A poor leather craftsman who dropped out of school at the age of 8, Dexter happened into his fortune when he made some lucky financial decisions regarding speculation on the Continental dollar and instantly became one of the richest men in Boston.

Unfortunately, high society folk never took to Dexter, regarding him as an uneducated man who married into his money. His wife, Elizabeth Frothingham, was independently wealthy and did not care for the lavish stables and gaudy statues that littered their property—including a statue of Dexter himself. Dexter went so far as to bestow upon himself the title of Lord, demanding his servants address him as such.

When the disapproval of his countrymen proved too much, Dexter decided to fake his own death so he could ascertain how the public really felt about him. He entrusted a few men to organize a grand funeral and let his family in on the ruse. While his children put on an appropriate display of grief, Dexter, who watched from a lavish tomb built in the basement of his home, determined his wife was smiling too much and not properly crying. He quickly marched to the kitchen, berated her, caned her, and then walked amongst the mourners as if nothing odd were happening. Unfortunately for Dexter, he never really received the respect he felt he deserved, and he died (for real, this time) six years later.

The death of Tsar Alexander I—who was raised by his grandmother, Catherine the Great, and succeeded the throne just a few years after her death—has long been contested and recently underwent a new round of questioning.

Svetlana Semyonova, the president of the Russian Graphological Society, conducted handwriting analyses in 2015 that strongly suggest similarities between Alexander’s penmanship and that of a monk known as Feodor Kuzmich (or Feodor Tomsky). Even before Semyonova’s latest examination, the rumor mill had long been claiming that Alexander staged his 1825 death from typhus.

Eleven years later, Kuzmich first appeared in the Russian city of Krasnoufimsk, where he was arrested and sent to the Siberian city of Tomsk. One proponent of the theory that Tsar Alexander and Kuzmich were one and the same was Leo Tolstoy, who noted that both commoners and members of the elite spoke about the astounding similarities between the two men, including their identical height, weight, age, and particularly round shoulders. The monk was also known to speak multiple languages and carry himself with an air of nobility, even though he claimed he was homeless and did not remember his family.

The Tomsk branch of the Orthodox church does not oppose the idea of testing Kuzmich’s DNA, so perhaps one day we will know once and for all whether the tsar and the monk were the same man. Interestingly enough, Alexander’s wife, who died the year after he allegedly did, is also rumored to have faked her death. Similarities between her handwriting and that of a nun support the theory that she too took on a holy order and became a nun known as Silent Vera.

William Goodwin Geddes is noteworthy if only because he was likely the first person in Australia to fake his death for financial reasons. Geddes, a surveyor, had a reputation for being an excellent swimmer and all-around athlete. But on November 29, 1877, Geddes mysteriously drowned in King John’s Creek in Queensland.

His brother, who had been with him at the time, said he heard Geddes call for help and attempted to save him, but his dives were fruitless. Geddes’s body was never found, and although his friends weren’t entirely convinced of his demise, his two life insurance policies were paid out four months later.

In 1889, a man who looked virtually identical to Geddes and went by the name Louis Sydney Brennan was admitted to the Adelaide Asylum for the Insane, having been committed after his wife of several years called the police on him. While Geddes’s parents said Brennan was not their son, Geddes and a policeman did recognize each other. The insurance company filed a suit against Geddes’s father for being complicit in the scam. Some have suggested that Geddes had a genuine case of amnesia after a horse-riding accident, but that wouldn’t explain his parents’s claim that they failed to recognize him.

Belle Gunness, or “Lady Bluebeard” as she came to be known, is believed to have murdered at least 14 people. She managed to evade prosecution, however, by staging her death. Gunness emigrated to America from Norway in the late 1880s, and by 1900, she had already been widowed after the death of her first husband. It is suspected, though, that her husband died of poisoning at her hand.

Two years later, her second husband died from a crushed skull, which Gunness claimed was caused when a meat grinder accidentally fell from a high shelf. Gunness’s two small children, her second husband’s youngest daughter, and a foster daughter also all died under mysterious circumstances while under her care. And even through her grief, Gunness was always sure to collect on life insurance policies for her family members soon after their deaths.

With greed as her apparent motive, Gunness kept on killing. She took out personal ads in the paper featuring text like:

“Comely widow who owns a large farm in one of the finest districts in La Porte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a gentleman equally well provided, with view of joining fortunes. No replies by letter considered unless sender is willing to follow answer with personal visit. Triflers need not apply.”

Her no-nonsense attitude garnered the attention she was looking for, and suitors appeared with money in hand only to be unceremoniously killed upon their arrival. Gunness was operating without suspicion until Andrew Helgelien answered her ad and disappeared shortly after. His brother, Asle, grew worried, but Gunness answered his concerned letters by saying his brother had gone to Norway.

Before Asle could get in touch with local police, in the early morning of April 28, 1908, Gunness’s Indiana farmhouse erupted in flames. Under a burnt piano were the bodies of three children and a headless woman everyone assumed to be Gunness. Police believed the fire to be set by Ray Lamphere, a hired hand and Gunness’s suspected lover. He was arrested and charged with arson when Asle Helgelien showed up with his theory that Gunness had murdered his brother and set the house on fire to hide her crime. The authorities investigated and soon found remains all over the farm, including those of Andrew Helgelien. Amid the remains found in the hog pens, police also discovered the bones of the foster child Gunness claimed had gone away to California.

Twelve hours before the fire, Gunness had been to a lawyer to draft a will, as she said she feared Lamphere would kill her and burn her house down. Lamphere, who was later convicted of arson, admitted on his deathbed in 1910 that he had set the fire and that Gunness had drugged and killed her children, but he insisted Gunness escaped unharmed. He claimed the headless body was that of a woman who had come to the farm to be a housekeeper and that Gunness had stolen millions from her murder victims. Because the corpse in the house didn’t quite match Gunness’s 280-pound frame and her bank account was suspiciously emptied the day before the fire.

While there is no definitive evidence that she faked her own death, many contemporaries believed that she did. Up until 1931, people claimed to see Gunness in and around the United States, once even during an investigation for the poisoning death of an old man. In 2008, a team of forensic analysts attempted to determine once and for all whether Gunness had fled the fire, but DNA tests on the remains were inconclusive.

It’s not every day you get to testify at the trial for your own murder. In 1926, Marion Franklin Rogers escaped from the State Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Arkansas after being admitted three months prior. He was married with three children, but after his escape he abandoned them and started a new life as a drifter. He claimed to be a 22-year-old named Connie Franklin, and he found work cutting timber and doing manual labor on a farm. As Franklin, he began courting 16-year-old Tillar (or Tiller, depending on the newspaper) Ruminer. In March 1929, he disappeared. Later that spring, Ruminer told authorities that her fiancé had been murdered in March of that year, but she had stayed silent because his murderers threatened to kill her if she told anyone.

According to Ruminer, on the night she and Franklin were to be married, they were ambushed by a group of attackers who beat him until he was unable to move. They then mutilated him and burned him while he was still alive, throwing his remains into a stream. Two of the men then sexually assaulted Ruminer before threatening her to ensure her silence. Four men were charged with Franklin’s torture and murder, but the December 1929 trial came unraveled when Rogers appeared, claiming to be the murdered man. (The trial was already unusual to watchers, as the prosecutor and defense attorney were brothers.)

Rogers testified that on the night in question, he got drunk with the defendants, was slightly injured after a fall from his mule, and vanished voluntarily because Ruminer wanted to postpone the wedding ceremony. His identity proved difficult to confirm, as some swore him to be their friend and neighbor, while others refused to believe he truly was Franklin. While handwriting comparisons seemed to support Rogers’s claim, tests of a pile of charred bones from the woods were inconclusive, and Ruminer did not acknowledge him as her former beau even though he recognized her father by name and serenaded her with her favorite songs both a cappella and on the harp. Ultimately the men on trial went free, and Rogers died of exposure in December 1932. Whether the real Franklin was murdered or Rogers merely faked his disappearance has yet to be positively established.

The story of Alfred Rouse reads like an episode of Law & Order. In a botched effort to escape child support payments for several illegitimate children, Rouse set out to fake his death by setting his car ablaze with someone else’s body inside.

He picked up a hitchhiker and promptly beat him with a mallet, set him in the driver’s seat, and lit a match. Rouse assumed his crime wound remain unseen in the early hours of the morning, but he was spotted by two witnesses. After his arrest, Rouse claimed the car had burst into flames when he left the hitchhiker alone with a lit cigar and asked him to fill the tank with some gas canisters. The police didn’t buy it, and Rouse was hanged in 1931.

Forensic scientists are still trying to identify Rouse’s victim thanks to a particularly solid DNA specimen, but so far they have only been able to eliminate a few candidates.

One of the more well-known fakers on our list, John Stonehouse gained fame before his disappearance as a Labour Party member in the British Parliament. Stonehouse was the son of a Southampton mayor and was accomplished in his own right: A graduate of the esteemed London School of Economics, he was a former postmaster general and served as secretary to the minister of aviation.

He had aspirations to be prime minister, but problems in his personal and political life were getting in the way. He was trapped in an unhappy marriage and wished to be with his secretary and lover, Sheila Buckley. Taking inspiration from Frederick Forsythe’s novel The Day of the Jackal, Stonehouse decided to create an alternate identity with the name Joseph Markham. He acquired a passport under his assumed name, opened foreign bank accounts to channel hidden funds, and finally staged his disappearance while on a trip to Florida in November 1974.

On a beach in Miami, Stonehouse took off his clothes, placed them in a pile, and walked away. It appeared he had drowned tragically in the Atlantic, and Stonehouse’s wife Barbara, as well as his political allies, initially believed he was truly gone. But American and British police weren’t so quick to agree, thinking he may have been involved in some sort of espionage. Stonehouse could have disappeared permanently except for unlucky timing.

On November 7—right around the time when Stonehouse vanished—the wealthy Richard John Bingham, Earl of Lucan, disappeared after being suspected in an attack in which his wife was beaten and the nanny murdered. When Stonehouse visited a bank in Australia, a teller became suspicious when he made a sizable deposit. Believing the man could be Lord Lucan, police put him under surveillance, only to discover he was the missing John Stonehouse. He was deported back to Britain, where he was sentenced to seven years in prison for theft and fraud. Lord Lucan, however, was never seen again.

A version of this article was originally published in 2015 and has been updated for 2023.

Owls are enigmatic birds, by turns mysterious, lovable, or spooky, depending on whom you ask. With over 200 species living on every continent except Antarctica, owls have super-tuned senses that help them hunt prey all over the world. And they’re pretty darn cute, too.

It’s a myth that owls can rotate their heads 360 degrees. The birds can actually turn their necks 135 degrees in either direction, which gives them 270 degrees of total movement. According to scientists, bone adaptations, blood vessels with contractile reservoirs, and a supporting vascular network allow the owls to turn their heads that far without cutting off blood to the brain.

Instead of spherical eyeballs, owls have “eye tubes” that go far back into their skulls—which means their eyes are fixed in place, so they have to turn their heads to see. The size of their eyes helps them see in the dark, and they’re far-sighted, which allows them to spot prey from yards away. Up close, everything is blurry, and they depend on small, hair-like feathers on their beaks and feet to feel their food.

Owls are capable of hearing prey under leaves, plants, dirt, and snow. Some owls have sets of ears at different heights on their heads, which lets them locate prey based on tiny differences in sound waves. Other owls have flat faces with special feathers that focus sound, essentially turning their faces into one big ear. (The “ear tufts” on some owls are feathers and don’t have anything to do with their actual ears.)

Unlike most birds, owls make virtually no noise when they fly. They have special feathers that break turbulence into smaller currents, which reduces sound. Soft velvety down further muffles noise.

Getting killed by an owl is gruesome. First the owl grabs the prey and crushes it to death with its strong talons. Then, depending on the size of the meal, it either eats the prey whole or rips it up. The owl’s digestive tract processes the body, and the parts that can’t be digested, like fur and bones, are compacted into a pellet, which the owl later regurgitates. Sometimes, those pellets are collected for kids to dissect in school.

Not only do owls eat surprisingly large prey (some species, like the eagle owl, can even grab small deer), but they also eat other species of owls. Great horned owls, for example, will attack the barred owl. The barred owl, in turn, sometimes eats the Western screech owl. In fact, owl-on-owl predation may be a reason why Western screech owl numbers have declined.

As harsh as it sounds, the parents typically feed the oldest and strongest owlet before its siblings. This means that if food is scarce, the youngest chicks will starve. After an owlet leaves the nest, it often lives nearby in the same tree, and its parents still bring it food. If it can survive the first winter on its own, its chances of survival are fairly good.

Many owls sleep in broad daylight, but the colors and markings on their feathers let them blend in with their surroundings.

Aside from hooting, owls make a variety of calls, from whinnies to whistles to squeaks. The barn owl hisses when it feels threatened, which sounds like something from a nightmare.

The world’s smallest owl is the elf owl, which lives in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. It will sometimes make its home in the giant saguaro cactus, nesting in holes made by other animals. But the elf owl isn’t picky and will also live in trees or on telephone poles.

The long-legged burrowing owl lives in North and South America. One of the few owls that is active during the daytime, it nests in the ground, moving into tunnels excavated by other animals such as prairie dogs. They’ll also dig their own homes if necessary. Then, they’ll surround the entrances to their burrows with dung and “sit at the burrow entrance all day long and it looks like they’re doing nothing,” University of Florida zoologist Douglas Levey told National Geographic. But they’re not doing nothing: They’re fishing. The poop is bait for dung beetles, one of the owls’ favorite types of prey. “Everybody who studies burrowing owls knows they bring dung back to their burrows, and they know that burrowing owls eat a lot of dung beetles. But nobody had put two and two together,” Levey, co-author of a 2004 study announcing the behavior, said.

Owls eat a lot of rodents. A single barn owl family will eat 3000 rodents in a four-month breeding cycle. One owl can eat 50 pounds of gophers in a year. Many farmers are installing owl nesting boxes in the hopes that owls will clean out pests like gophers and voles from their land. This natural form of pest control is safer and cheaper than using poison, and it’s better for the owls too. Many owls die each year from eating rodents that have been poisoned.

In ancient Greece, the little owl (Athene noctua) was the companion of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, which is one reason why owls symbolize learning and knowledge. But Athena was also a warrior goddess and the owl was considered the protector of armies going into war. If Greek soldiers saw an owl fly by during battle, they took it as a sign of coming victory.

From ancient times on, owls have been linked with death, evil, and superstitions. Many cultures saw owls as a sign of impending death. For example, an owl was said to have predicted the death of Julius Caesar. They’ve also been associated with witches and other so-called evil beings. While this may sound like Halloween fun, many cultures still have superstitions about owls and in some places, owls are killed based on these beliefs.

Owls have been popular since ancient times. They show up in Egyptian hieroglyphs and in 30,000-year-old cave paintings in France. Falconers have used owls since the Middle Ages, although not as commonly as other birds. Today, we still love owls. Though it’s illegal to keep native owls as pets in the U.S., they’re intelligent and sociable. (Most of the time, anyway—owls can also attack humans when feeling threatened.)

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

“I am pouring forth a penny dreadful,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a friend in the autumn of 1885. “It is dam dreadful.”

The pulp piece the Treasure Island author was referring to was the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a novella about a man with a (now notorious) split personality: the good Dr. Jekyll and the terrible Mr. Hyde. The book taps into fundamental truths about human nature, and has influenced everything from the detective story to the Incredible Hulk. Here’s what you should know.

Stevenson had long been fascinated with split personalities but couldn’t figure out how to write about them. Then one night, he had a dream about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “In the small hours of one morning … I was awakened by cries of horror from Louis,” his wife Fanny said. “Thinking he had a nightmare, I awakened him. He said angrily: ‘Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.’”

Stevenson later elaborated on the dream in an essay called “A Chapter On Dreams”: “For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort,” he wrote, “and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and consciously[.]”

Many historians speculate that the duality of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was inspired by an 18th-century Edinburgh cabinet maker named Deacon Brodie, a respectable town councilor and an extremely successful craftsman. Brodie’s job gave him access to the keys of the rich and famous, which he made copies of in order to rob them at night. After a string of heists, he was eventually caught and hanged (according to legend, on a gallows that he helped design). 

Brodie’s story fascinated the people of Edinburgh, including Stevenson—even though the thief died more than 60 years before Stevenson was born. The future writer grew up with a Brodie cabinet in his room, and in 1880, he cowrote a play called Deacon Brodie, or the Double Life. But the cabinet, and the man who built it, may have influenced Jekyll and Hyde, too: In 1887, Stevenson told an interviewer that the dream that inspired his story involved a man “being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being.” 

A lifelong invalid, Stevenson was sick with tuberculosis when he wrote the famous tale. He’d recently suffered a lung hemorrhage and was under doctor’s orders to rest and avoid excitement. Still, that didn’t stop him from cranking out the first draft of the 30,000-word novella in somewhere between three and six days flat, and then a second, rewritten draft in another meager three days (more about that in a minute).

In the book, Dr. Jekyll takes a drug from a chemist that turns him into another person. He likes it—until he loses control of the drug. Stevenson may have been drawing from personal experience. It’s been reported that he was prescribed medicinal cocaine to treat his hemorrhage (it was discovered in the 1880s that cocaine tightens blood vessels), and that the inspired dream for the story occurred during a cocaine-fueled slumber. Stevenson later professed an affection for the drug, and his wild writing stint is consistent with someone on cocaine. Then again, it’s also consistent with a man faced with financial problems (as Stevenson was) and his own mortality, swept up by inspiration and a great idea.

According to one version of events, after reading the manuscript for Jekyll and Hyde, Fanny criticized its failure to successfully execute the story’s moral allegory (among other things). Fanny later recounted that she then found her husband sitting in bed with a thermometer in his mouth. He pointed to a pile of ashes in the fireplace, revealing he’d burned the draft. “I nearly fainted away with misery and horror when I saw all was gone,” she wrote. 

There are actually several theories as to how the first draft went up in flames. In 2000, a letter found in an attic revealed more of Fanny’s thoughts on the book, and her mysterious role in the manuscript’s burning. “He wrote nearly a quire of utter nonsense,” she wrote to friend and poet W.E. Henley. “Fortunately he has forgotten all about it now, and I shall burn it after I show it to you. He said it was his greatest work.” The artifact contradicts Fanny’s previous recounting, as well the one her son told of Stevenson burning the manuscript after he and Fanny got in a fight. In any case, Stevenson spent six weeks revising the book before it was ready for publication.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde sold 40,000 copies in six months, and soon there were more than 250,000 pirated copies in North America. People seized on the moral message of the story. They wrote about it in religious newspapers and preachers gave sermons about it in churches. Within a year, there was a play based on the book, and soon there were productions in Scotland and the United States. It was Stevenson’s most successful novel.

The most common interpretation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is that Mr. Hyde’s corruption comes from sexual activity in the form of assault, promiscuity, or homosexuality. (Remember, it was the Victorian era.) In a private letter to the New York Sun, Stevenson wrote that Mr. Hyde was not “a mere voluptuary. There is no harm in a voluptuary and … none—no harm whatever—in what prurient fools call ‘immorality.’” He added that Hyde was a hypocrite, “the essence of cruelty and malice, and selfishness and cowardice.” 

In 1888, a stage play of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde opened starring Richard Mansfield as Jekyll/Hyde. The audience raved about Mansfield’s performance, finding it “thrilling and terrifying in equal measure,” according to Salon.

Then, two days after the play opened, Jack the Ripper began his infamous killing spree in London. It wasn’t long before people started connecting him to the stage adaptation, with some suggesting that the serial killer’s mind was poisoned by the play. Still others thought that Mansfield himself was the killer—and letters in the newspaper suggested that Mansfield was too good at playing a killer not to be Jack the Ripper.

By 1931, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had already been adapted for film 24 times, including a 1920 film starring John Barrymore. But the 1931 version impressed critics with its transformation scene, in which the actor Fredric March—who later won an Academy Award for his performance—turns into Hyde. The secret of how director Rouben Mamoulian shot the scene wasn’t revealed until the 1970s: It was done with colored make-up and matching colored filters, which were removed or added to the scene to change March’s appearance. Since the film was in black-and-white, the color changes didn’t show. You can watch the scene above.

There are few books that have seeped more deeply into popular culture than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Beyond movies, there have been cartoon adaptations with Mighty Mouse and Bugs Bunny. Stan Lee once said that along with Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde helped to inspire The Incredible Hulk. There’s a musicals—1990’s Jekyll & Hyde—and a 1988 Nintendo game. Comedies and parodies abound, including Stan Laurel’s silent-but-amusing spoof Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pride (above), which holds up pretty well.

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

These dogs have a lot of personality packed into little bodies. Learn more about this energetic breed and its history.

These little dogs were bred from a collection of terriers, including the Waterside terrier, in order to hunt rats. Miners, weavers, and other business owners in Scotland used the tiny exterminators to keep their workspaces rodent-free. Because of their compact size, Yorkshires could squeeze into tiny spaces; their fierce personalities helped them fearlessly take on their rodent prey. Like other terriers, the dogs were also used during hunts to flush prey out of its den. 

When weavers came to England for work in the mid-1800s, they brought their tiny dogs with them. Before long, the breed caught on, and started appearing in shows in 1861.

When the breed first hit the scene in England, they were known as broken-haired Scotch terriers. They kept this moniker for nearly a decade before a reporter named Angus Sutherland opined that the name should be changed. He believed that although the breed originated in Scotland, it wasn’t perfected until coming to Yorkshire, England. “They ought no longer be called Scotch Terriers, but Yorkshire Terriers for having been so improved there,” Sutherland reported in The Field magazine. People seemed to agree, because in 1870, the name was officially changed. 

Most consider a Yorkie named Huddersfield Ben the father of the breed. The stud dog was a ratting champion and a confident competitor in dog shows; he won over 70 awards. He was a hefty dog, weighing 11 pounds, but all his litters yielded puppies that were under 5 pounds, which was the standard at that time. Even though he only lived to be six years old, he left behind an impressive legacy: Most Yorkies bred for shows today are distant relatives of Ben.

When American soldier Bill Wynne found a Yorkshire terrier in a foxhole during WWII, he named her Smoky and took her in. The two traveled through New Guinea, and Smoky soon began to help with the war effort. Thanks to her small size and obedience, she was able to run through pipes and string communication wires under a former Japanese airstrip. Without her help, soldiers would have had to dig trenches and expose themselves to enemy fire.

Smoky also toured hospitals throughout the Pacific and the United States, working as a therapy dog for wounded soldiers. After wartime, she and Wynne went to Hollywood, where she performed on various TV shows. You can visit a monument dedicated to her memory where she passed away in Cleveland, Ohio.

Yorkies do not shed, so that means they depend on their owners to keep their hair in check. Left unattended, their hair will keep growing, just like a human’s would—in fact, Yorkshire terrier hair can grow to be two feet long. While show dogs tend to have longer hair, most casual owners keep their dog’s hair short to keep them from tripping or getting food stuck in it. This shaggy look is often called “the puppy cut.” 

In 1984, a little Yorkie named Schneeflocken von Friedheck was born with unusual markings in blue, white, and gold. The breeders Werner and Gertrud Biewer decided to take this unique puppy and create a new breed. With careful and selective breeding, they established a distinct standard for the breed which would become known as the Biewer terrier. In 2014, the American Kennel Club provisionally accepted the new Yorkie as a registered breed. 

Yorkshire terriers are especially prone to pharyngeal gag reflex, or reverse sneezing. Instead of pushing air out of the nose like a normal sneeze, dogs will gasp for air, making a honking sound like a goose. While somewhat alarming to witness, these noises are ultimately harmless and pass after a few minutes. Usually, they’re brought on by irritants like pollen, dust, cleaners, and perfumes. 

Although not a particularly old breed, these tiny dogs were one of the AKC’S original breeds. Yorkshire terriers became registered in 1885 along with classics such as the beagle, basset hound, and bull terrier. 

Yorkies are small dogs, weighing an average of seven pounds, but it seems like no one told them that. The dogs have no problem taking on animals considerably bigger than them.

In August 2015, Larry Yepez stepped out of his home early in the morning while it was still dark out. A bear had been rummaging through his trash and attacked the man. Yepez put up a good fight, but struggled to get away from the agitated 200-pound mammal. Luckily, his Yorkie was there to nip at the heels of the attacker and distract it long enough for the duo to make a quick escape. Thanks to his pet’s intervention, the bloodied victim was able to drive himself to the hospital—and live to tell the tale. 

Like a cheetah’s spots or a zebra’s stripes, a male lion’s mane is perhaps the animal’s most iconic feature. But there is actually a significant amount of variation in the king of the jungle’s ’do, from voluminous golden locks to none at all. 

For years, scientists identified different lion species and subspecies, in part, by the length of their locks. They believed that mane length was a genetic characteristic, passed down from generation to generation.

But a 2006 study by Bruce Patterson, now the curator emeritus of mammals at the Field Museum in Chicago, revealed that the length can largely be attributed to climate. According to the museum, the temperature of a zoo lion’s environment is responsible for up to half of the span and density of its mane. While genetics may also be a factor—some of the big cats may be predisposed to longer, more luxurious manes—temperature can cause a huge amount of variation. This means scientists may need to reevaluate some of their existing taxonomy.

Patterson studied lions at 17 zoos across the United States, recording area temperatures and the length of the hair around each mammal’s neck. He found that those in colder climates had significantly longer strands than those in warmer areas. Because manes take energy to grow and maintain, lions in warmer temperatures, who don’t need the ring of hair to keep warm, simply grow smaller ones.

While it’s relatively rare, some lions in particularly extreme heat don’t grow manes at all. In fact, Patterson’s study was inspired by two such lions—the famous Tsavo man-eaters.

Back in the late 19th century, the Tsavo lions hunted and killed as many as 135 people in Tsavo, Kenya. They were eventually shot, killed, and donated to the Field Museum where, close to a century later, Patterson became transfixed by their maneless condition. “Even a small mane can be imposing in hot dry climates, where the costs of overheating are great and most male lions have little or no mane,” Patterson said in a Field Museum news article. “This is the case in Tsavo, Kenya, where most lions are maneless.”

As for why the Tsavo lions went after people, Patterson and his colleagues posited that the animals’ dental issues—which included broken and missing teeth and abscesses—could have contributed to their human-centric diet. Patterson said in a statement that “Humans are so much easier to catch” than typical lion prey like wildebeests.

Now that you know why some male lions have manes and some don’t, find out whether lions are really brave and why the animals were so funny looking in old illustrations.

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