Category: Bazaar News

The rank of five-star general is an honor bestowed upon very few. In fact, you can name them on one hand: George C. Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Henry “Hap” Arnold, and Omar Bradley. Hap Arnold was actually general of both the Army and the Air Force, making him the only man to ever hold both titles. But that doesn’t make him the highest-ranking military official. That honor belongs to a man who has been dead for more than 200 years.

On July 4, 1976, the nation’s bicentennial, George Washington was posthumously promoted to General of the Armies of the United States. When Washington actually served in the army, he was a merely a major general—two stars. After his presidency, John Adams promoted him to lieutenant general—three stars. It stayed that way for centuries, with every four- and five-star general who came afterward outranking him.

After his World War I successes, General John J. Pershing was actually the first to be deemed General of the Armies of the United States. Because the five-star rank had yet to be created, however, Pershing remained a four-star general (his four-star insignia was gold rather than the traditional silver, though). The five-star designation was created in 1944, but the War Department specified that Pershing was still to be considered the highest-ranking official in the military.

Until 1976, that is. The exact phrasing of the law passed to promote Washington reads [PDF], “Whereas it is considered fitting and proper that no officer of the United States Army should outrank Lieutenant General George Washington on the Army list: Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That . . . The President is authorized and requested to appoint George Washington posthumously to the grade of General of the Armies of the United States, such appointment to take effect on July 4, 1976.”

Technically, the law decreeing that no military official could outrank Washington didn’t specifically grant a six-star general designation. But some argue Washington’s ascension to such a rank means exactly that, and newspapers even reported it as such back in 1976.

Either way, of course, the law’s intent is purely symbolic (unless that whole zombie apocalypse thing really happens). But one thing’s for sure: Without Washington, the Fourth of July might just be the fourth of July, and no other military official will ever be able to top that.

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

Pizza has always been an intensely competitive industry: family-run pizza places compete against chains, while local chefs battle each other, trying to out-cook their competitors, and undercut each other’s prices. All across America in the 1980s, one of the greatest pizza wars in history took place, not between feuding chefs, but between a video game developer, an inventor, and a hotel chain manager. Also embroiled in the conflict were a dog, a cat, a pack of wolves, a handful of bears, and the world’s most famous animatronic rat: Chuck E. Cheese. 

The battle hinged not on pizza, but on robotics. The first Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre opened in San Jose, California, in 1977. In addition to pizza and arcade-style video games, it featured a live show starring a cast of animatronic performers, led by their namesake Chuck, a robotic “New Joisey Rat” with an attitude, and who sometimes sported a cigar.

The combination restaurant and entertainment center was the pet project of Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and inventor of Pong. At the time, Bushnell was selling Atari consoles to arcades: though he made between $1500 to $2000 for each console sold, arcades were reaping in profits in the tens of thousands. Bushnell started thinking of ways to get into the arcade game, and came up with the idea for the Pizza Time Theatre.

“The reason for doing the animals, believe it or not,” he explained, in a 2013 interview with The Atlantic, “was not for the kids. It was meant to be a head fake for the parents.” Predicting parents would be reluctant to bring their children to an arcade, Bushnell devised a novel—and importantly, free—form of entertainment to draw families to his restaurant: animatronic performers.

In addition to the eponymous rat, the act consisted of multiple characters, including Jasper T. Jowls (a hound dog); Crusty (a cat); Madame Oink (a pig); the Warblettes (three magpies); Pasqually (a pizza chef, and the only “human” cast member); and Mr. Munch (a purple monster described as a “purple pizza eater”). The robots hung in giant picture frames on the walls of the first Pizza Time Theatre, performing pop songs and cracking surprisingly risqué jokes. According to Bushnell, “If you listened to the dialogue, it was fun, edgy stuff, kinda like Toy Story, written as much for the parents as the kids.”

Bushnell had his robots, but he needed investors. For the first year of its operation, the restaurant was actually a division of Atari Inc., but in June 1978, Bushnell purchased all the assets and rights from Atari for $500,000 and formed Pizza Time Theatre as a private corporation, with himself initially acting as president and chairman. He eventually teamed up with Bob Brock, chairman of the Brock Hotel Corporation, one of the largest franchisees of Holiday Inns. Brock promised Bushnell financial support, and Bushnell, in return, promised Brock the best animatronic technology in the world.

Bushnell told Brock that the Chuck E. Cheese “Pizza Time Players” (as the robot group was originally called) were not only the best—they were the only animatronic characters outside of the Disney parks. In fact, Bushnell claimed in a 1979 interview that Pizza Time Theatres were really “Disneyland carried to American families at the local level.”

And that’s precisely when things started to fall apart.

In 1979, Brock met a young inventor named Aaron Fechter. At 28, Fechter had a string of unsuccessful inventions under his belt, including a fuel-efficient car that looked like a golf cart, and a pool-cleaning machine that he’d attempted to sell door to door. Fechter had also created and lost the rights to Whac-A-Mole before diving into animatronics. 

When Brock met him, Fechter had just finished building an animatronic musical act called “The Wolf-Pack Five.” Brock instantly realized Fechter’s animatronics were more advanced than Bushnell’s. Their movements were more subtle, their facial expressions changed, their lupine drummer could really play the drums. Brock cancelled his deal with Bushnell and teamed up with Fechter’s company, Creative Engineering, to start the ShowBiz Pizza franchise.

This “betrayal” launched the war between ShowBiz and Chuck E. Cheese: a war which, incidentally, Fechter and Bushnell would both end up losing.

The first ShowBiz Pizza location opened in Kansas City in 1980—three years and 1800 miles away from the first Chuck E. Cheese location—offering a suspiciously similar combination of pizza, video games, and performing robots. Instead of Chuck E. Cheese and his “Pizza Time Players,” the ShowBiz show featured the Rock-afire Explosion, an animatronic band which included a wise-cracking polar bear, an alcoholic bird, a wolf ventriloquist, and “Billy Bob Brockali,” a good-natured “country bear” named for ShowBiz founder, Bob Brock.

It’s unclear why Brock didn’t alter the restaurant concept more to differentiate it from its progenitor; he could have easily swapped out pizza for any number of casual dining options (why not ShowBiz Burgers?). Maybe he was too far along in his plans to change course, or perhaps he shared Bushnell’s view that pizza just made the most sense “in terms of build schedule.” As Bushnell noted in his Atlantic interview, pizza has “very few components and not too many ways to screw it up. If the dough is good, the cheese is good, and the sauce is good, the pizza is good. I didn’t have any preconceived idea that I knew how to run a restaurant, but I knew simple was better.”

There were, of course, subtle differences between the two restaurants. Among customers, the general consensus was that ShowBiz had better animatronics, and a more “grown-up” act, while Chuck E. Cheese had slightly superior pizza.

One intrepid reporter for San Francisco’s Evening magazine actually reviewed two local ShowBiz and Chuck E. Cheese locations in 1983. After touring each restaurant, he concluded that ShowBiz, with its edgy rock-and-roll bears, seemed geared towards an older audience, while Chuck E. Cheese was more kid-friendly. In terms of food, Chuck E. Cheese was the clear winner: ShowBiz’s pizza was cheaper but “bland,” whereas Chuck E. Cheese delivered tasty pizza, with a thin, matzo-like crust. Though “matzo-like” isn’t traditionally a quality associated with great pizza, the reporter concluded that Chuck E. Cheese pizza was better.

In 1980, with the ShowBiz franchise looming large on the horizon, Bushnell turned to Warner Communications for aid. As he’d recently sold both Chuck E. Cheese and Atari to Warner, he was hoping the company would be interested in helping him turn the place into a franchise. Warner, however, had no interest in funding a weird restaurant full of singing robots. Bushnell continued to run the business himself until other franchisers gradually trickled in. Doubly spurned and angered by the whole ordeal, he began plotting his revenge. His feelings towards Brock could not have been clearer—or more public. In 1982, Bushnell bluntly told Fortune magazine, “Bob Brock is a very greedy guy.” [PDF]

Rock-afire inventor Aaron Fechter, meanwhile, was in heaven. For years, he’d been struggling to get his inventions off the ground, and now, with a 20 percent share in the ShowBiz franchise (Brock held the other 80 percent), he finally had the financial backing and creative freedom he’d dreamed of.

His Rock-afire performances became increasingly complex. He handed the financial management of Creative Engineering over to his father, and focused full time on devising Rock-afire acts, overseeing everything from programming to choreography, and even providing voices for several Rock-afire characters.

The Rock-afire Explosion began churning out covers of hit ‘60s and ‘70s pop songs (legend has it that when Michael Jackson heard the Rock-afire’s Beatles medley, he decided on the spot to purchase the entire Beatles catalogue), as well as original numbers. Programming the choreography was a laborious process. Each eye roll, head bob, and wave of the hand had to be programmed individually, a process that took hours.

For Fechter, the goal was to turn animatronics into a fully realized art form. He dreamed of becoming the next Walt Disney, and even went as far as to call his animatronic characters “the greatest entertainment medium to come out of the 1980s.” In an early ‘80s interview with Fortune magazine, Fechter explained, “Brock’s benefiting financially from the deal—he’s making money—but I’m going to change the world.” But Fechter’s days of unrestrained invention wouldn’t last for long.

Over at Chuck E. Cheese, Bushnell was incensed by Brock’s betrayal, and launched a lawsuit against ShowBiz Pizza. It was the first shot fired in a lengthy battle. Brock shot back with a countersuit, citing misrepresentation. After lengthy negotiations, ShowBiz settled in 1982, and agreed to pay an estimated $50 million to Chuck E. Cheese for the next 14 years.

As ShowBiz and Chuck E. Cheese were essentially glorified arcades, the crash had a serious impact on both businesses. Though both were stretched thin by the crash, Chuck E. Cheese was hit harder. Bushnell had racked up somewhere in the realm of $50 million in debt by using Chuck E. Cheese money to fund other start-up ventures, and was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1984. In a staggering move, Bushnell was pushed out and ShowBiz snapped up the failing franchise. It continued to operate both Chuck E. Cheese and ShowBiz locations independently (by that point, it’s likely Chuck E. Cheese was simply too popular a character to kill off) and renamed the company Showbiz Pizza Time.

Brock and Fechter were victorious. But once again, victory was short-lived, only this time for Fechter. ShowBiz was still losing money, and management decided the increasingly elaborate and expensive Rock-afire Explosion acts were in part to blame.

They began phasing Fechter out, using voice impersonators to play his characters. Fechter, growing increasingly disillusioned with ShowBiz, began turning to other projects: In addition to building a series of new animatronics and high-tech Rock-afire toys, he started work on the “Anti-Gravity Machine,” a predecessor to email, which could send messages over telephone lines. Finally, in 1990, Fechter’s company, Creative Engineering, was ousted from ShowBiz completely.

Like Bushnell, Fechter had lost the war. But Fechter didn’t leave empty-handed: He took the Rock-afire Explosion with him, refusing to sell ShowBiz the character rights.

Convinced the Rock-afire characters had a future independent of ShowBiz—possibly in movies or TV—Fechter decided to keep working on the robots. Without the rights to the Rock-afire Explosion, ShowBiz was forced to convert the remaining Rock-afire robots into Chuck E. Cheese characters, replacing their exteriors, but leaving the original machinery intact [PDF]. The creepy process, called “concept unification,” can be seen here.

In the years since the robot pizza wars rocked America, Chuck E. Cheese has continued to soldier on. In 1998, the company once known as Showbiz Pizza was rebranded simply as CEC Entertainment Inc.; in 2014, it was sold to Apollo Global Management (which owned Claire’s jewelry stores) for $950 million. Then, amid financial troubles brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the restaurant chain filed for bankruptcy again in 2020. (But they later emerged from it.) Though much has changed over the years—Chuck, for instance, has been turned from a rat into a “hipper” CGI-rendered mouse—Chuck E. Cheese remains one of the hottest party spots for the under-10 crowd.

Bushnell, meanwhile, has continued to launch startups and develop video games since losing Chuck E. Cheese in 1984. As of 2013, his projects included a series of “anti-aging” games, as well as BrainRush, a software company that turns educational subjects into video games.

Fechter, too, moved on to other inventions. Unfortunately, one project—an alternative fuel called Carbohydrillium—experienced some major setbacks. In 2013, a high-pressure bottle of Fechter’s Carbohydrillium exploded, nearly demolishing the Creative Engineering warehouse. (He later attributed the blast to “pressure and rust.”) Fortunately, Fechter’s remaining Rock-afire Explosion robots were largely unharmed by the blast.

In fact, after years of obscurity, the robots made something of a comeback in 2008, when ShowBiz super-fan Chris Thrash began filming new Rock-afire productions and uploading them to YouTube. With Fechter’s approval (and occasional assistance), Thrash programmed the Rock-afire Explosion to perform contemporary pop songs (including Usher’s “Love in the Club” and Nine Inch Nails’ “100,000,000”). Furthermore, in 2015, a documentary on the Rock-afire Explosion was released on YouTube, and as of 2023, has over a million views.

In the end, though Fechter and Bushnell have moved on to new endeavors, the pizza wars—and the ultimate loss of their companies—left a bad taste in their mouths. When Bushnell was recently asked about his battle with ShowBiz, he responded, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

He then proceeded to launch into the full story of his battle with Brock and Fechter.

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

Though native to South America, pineapples (scientific name: Ananas comosus) made their way to the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, and it was here that Christopher Columbus first spotted their spiky crowns in 1493. Columbus and his crew took pineapples back to Spain, where everyone loved how sweet this new, exotic fruit tasted. They tried to grow them there, but because pineapples need a tropical climate to grow, Europeans didn’t get very far. The only pineapples they could get their hands on had to be imported from across the Atlantic Ocean—a time-consuming trek that often resulted in bruised, rotten fruit.

Later, in the mid-17th century, pineapples were grown in a few hothouses in England and the Netherlands, in conditions that mimicked the warm temperature and humidity levels needed to produce the fruit. Because pineapples were in high demand and low in supply, only the extremely wealthy could afford them. Monarchs such as Louis XV, Catherine the Great, and Charles II (who even commissioned a painting of his gardener presenting him with a pineapple) enjoyed eating the sweet fruit, and pineapples came to symbolize luxury and opulence.

In the American colonies in the 1700s, pineapples were no less revered. Imported from the Caribbean islands, pineapples that arrived in America were very expensive—one pineapple could cost as much as $8000 (in today’s dollars). This high cost was due to the perishability, novelty, exoticism, and scarcity of the fruit. Affluent colonists would throw dinner parties and display a pineapple as the centerpiece, a symbol of their wealth, hospitality, and status, instantly recognizable by a party’s guests. Pineapples, however, were mainly used for decoration at this time; they were only eaten once they started going rotten.

To underscore just how lavish and extravagant pineapples were, consider the pineapple rental market. The fruit evoked such jealousy among the poor, pineapple-less plebs that people could, if they wished, pay to rent a pineapple for the night. Before selling them for consumption, pineapple merchants rented pineapples to people who couldn’t afford to purchase them. Those who rented would take the pineapple to parties, not to give as a gift to the host, but to carry around and show off their apparent ability to afford such an expensive fruit.

Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, artists depicted pineapples to symbolize hospitality and generosity. Napkins, tablecloths, wallpaper, and even bedposts were decorated with drawings and carvings of pineapples to make guests feel welcome. If people couldn’t afford to buy or rent the real fruit, they bought porcelain dishes and teapots in the shape of a pineapple, which became hugely popular starting in the 1760s. 

But fast-forward to 1900, when industrialist James Dole started a pineapple plantation in Hawaii, hoping to sell and distribute the fruit with his business, the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, which would later become the Dole Food Company. He was hugely successful—for seven decades, his Lana’i plantation produced more than 75 percent of the world’s pineapples—and the company is still going strong. Love for the fruit hasn’t waned either—they are still a popular decorating motif. 

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

Few paintings are as iconic as Grant Wood’s American Gothic. The artwork’s staging is so embedded into American culture that even its countless parodies and homages are instantly recognizable. While this deceptively simple portrait has clearly captured the imagination of the nation, the story behind its creation and rise to fame makes it all the more compelling. 

American Gothic was submitted to the 1930 annual exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it won a bronze medal and a $300 prize. But that’s not all: The Art Institute acquired the piece for its collection. From there, a picture of the prize-winning painting ran in the Chicago Evening Post, then in newspapers across the U.S., gaining fame and popularity with each printing. Almost a century later, American Gothic still calls the Art Institute home.

Before this breakthrough, Wood was an unknown 39-year-old aspiring artist, living in the attic of a funeral home carriage house that he shared with his mother and sister. Although he was toiling in obscurity, artistic training in Europe had taught Wood techniques that led to his big break.

Following the success of American Gothic, Wood became a bit of a media scamp, often rewriting the history and meaning of his painting to best suit a given trend or narrative. And his fans became ravenous, sometimes traveling to his family’s home, and walking right into Wood’s quarters uninvited. 

In the summer of 1930, Wood was visiting Eldon, Iowa, to attend an art exhibition. While there, he was struck by a little white cottage with a “carpenter Gothic” window on the second floor—Wood found it “pretentious” for such a humble home. He sketched out the house on an envelope, providing the base for what would become his most famous painting. 

Wood may have found them pretentious, but the windows (one in the front of the house, one in the back) were hinged to allow the family that lived there to more easily move large furniture in and out, uninhibited by a narrow staircase inside. As extraordinary as they seem in a home instead of a larger structure like a church, it’s believed the the distinctive windows were picked out of a Sears and Roebuck catalog.

Inspired by the window that recalled the cathedrals he’d seen in Europe during his training and travels, Wood posed his quintessentially American figures in a “rigid frontal arrangement” that recalls Northern Renaissance art, while mimicking that movement’s close attention to detail. 

When Wood needed a model for the man in American Gothic, he asked his dentist, 62-year-old Byron McKeeby. It’s likely McKeeby felt a bit obligated, as Wood’s constant craving for sugar—he even put it on lettuce—made him a client worth keeping happy. All that time in the exam chair gave Wood ample opportunity to examine McKeeby’s face and strong hands. Of them, he said, “This is a marvelous hand. This has strength. This has character.” 

The artist’s first choice for a female model was his mother, Hattie—but he was concerned that posing at length would be too much for her, so he used his sister Nan instead. Hattie did contribute by lending her apron and cameo for her daughter’s costume, though.

Wood painted the house, his sister, and his dentist in separate sessions.

When the newspapers in Wood’s hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, first presented an image of American Gothic, the painting sparked a backlash. This dour portrayal was not how the locals saw themselves, and they resented being presented this way to the world. One farm wife was so enraged by the painting that she threatened to bite Wood’s ear off. Another suggested he have his “head bashed in.” Wood was stunned by the acrimony, insisting he was a “loyal Iowan” who meant no offense, only homage.

Nan would later write to a newspaper that when she posed for her brother, “He showed me some pictures of old Gothic stone carvings from a cathedral in France, and asked me if I could pull my face out long and look like some of the women in the carvings. I told him some of my neighbors looked like that just naturally, but he explained that he couldn’t ask them to pose without hurting their feelings, so I gladly consented to pose and still consider it a great honor. … (No Iowa woman) should feel hurt about the painting if I don’t, unless as I suspect she sees some resemblance to herself!”

A popular caption for the painting in newspapers was An Iowa Farmer and His Wife, but that was not how the painting’s female model saw it. Nan told people the painting depicted a father and his daughter, perhaps because she resented being “married” to a man twice her age. Wood himself waffled on this point. 

In December 1930, Wood wrote to The Des Moines Register about American Gothic, saying that “Any northern town old enough to have some buildings dating back to the Civil War is liable to have a house or church in the American Gothic style. I simply invented some American Gothic people to stand in front of a house of this type,” adding, “It was my intention, later, to do a Mission bungalow painting as a companion piece, with Mission bungalow types standing in front of it. The accent then, of course, would be put on the horizontal instead of the vertical.”

In the same letter, Wood noted that “The people in American Gothic are not farmers but are small-town, as the shirt on the man indicates. They are American, however, and it is unfair to localize them to Iowa.”

Early on, writers like Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley believed American Gothic satirized the provincialism of small-town America. But as the Great Depression damaged American morale, American Gothic was viewed as much-needed celebration of the nation’s fortitude and spirit. Now, its purpose transforms with each new parody. 

Wood gave this confounding statement: “There is satire in it, but only as there is satire in any realistic statement. These are types of people I have known all my life. I tried to characterize them truthfully—to make them more like themselves than they were in actual life.”

Look in the bottom right corner of the farmer’s overalls, and you’ll see the artist’s name painted along with the year (1930) in pale blue, almost invisible against its denim backdrop.

An American realist modern art movement that shunned urbanism in favor of the glories found in rural settings, Regionalism (or American Scene painting) hit the peak of its popularity in the 1930s thanks to Wood’s works as well as those of Missouri’s Thomas Hart Benton and Kansas’s John Steuart Curry. Wood played into this brand, always sporting overalls, and proclaiming to the press, “All the good ideas I’ve ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.”

Grant was actually repulsed by farm animals, and it has been suggested that his penchant for overalls was all PR—not just to play up his artist persona, but also to help hide (through this perceived manliness) his homosexuality. 

Built in 1881 by Catherine and Charles Dibble, the Dibble House passed through owners for more than a century before Carl Smith donated it to the State Historical Society of Iowa in 1991. Since then, it has been transformed into a museum celebrating Wood and the painting that made him and the house famous. 

Some observers have suggested that the man pictured is no farmer at all, but a preacher using the pitchfork as a prop to rail against the devil and his dangers. Perhaps the curl of the woman’s hair is meant to paint her as a sharp-tongued spinster. Is the rickrack on her apron meant to allude to old-school values, or mock her as out of date? Their expressions have been read as resolute or sullen. The window’s curtains might mean a hidden secret. Do the geraniums in the background signify  melancholy? 

Wood never cleared up any of these points, and so the mystery and debate over American Gothic rages on decades after his passing.

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

The 102-year-old pregnant corpse.

Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files, gave him the premise. It was a challenge, a dare, and he was responsible for the rest. One by one, the pages went up in the window. They were immaculately typed, spaced, and edited in his head long before his fingers hit the keys.

He started at 1 p.m., craning the necks of passerby outside the shop. They wondered about the man sitting in the window, hunched over a typewriter. It was like a piece of glass that allowed you to see the gears and pistons of a machine.

When the Dangerous Visions bookstore in Sherman Oaks, Calif., closed that day, Harlan Ellison had completed “Objects of Desire in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear,” a short story that, yes, included a pregnant corpse and added three suspects.

By this time in 1998, Ellison had already been writing for 40-plus years, collected virtually every award a writer of speculative fiction could receive, and bolstered the reputation of the original Star Trek series by writing the seminal episode, “The City on the Edge of Forever.” He had marched in Selma, sued James Cameron for appropriating his ideas in The Terminator, and mouthed off to a posturing Frank Sinatra.

He was also prolific, and that meant buying less into the idea of writing as a mystical art. To help discourage that notion, Ellison began public compositions in bookstore windows in the 1970s, inspired by French author Georges Simenon, who was rumored to have written an entire novel while sitting in a glass cage. (He didn’t, but Ellison didn’t know that until years later.)

“I do it because I think particularly in this country people are so distanced from literature, the way it’s taught in schools, that they think that people who write are magicians on a mountaintop somewhere,” he told NBC after one such performance in 1981. “And I think that’s one of the reasons why there’s so much illiteracy in this country. So by doing it in public, I show people it’s a job … like being a plumber or an electrician.”

Amid distractions, gaping pedestrians, and breaks to entertain autograph seekers, Ellison churned out stories in bookstore windows overlooking Washington, London, Boston, and New York. Good ones, too. The five days he spent in the window of A Change of Hobbit in Santa Monica in 1977 resulted in work that garnered three awards.

Sometimes he would play music. In one of his foreign appearances, tourists kept asking him where they could find certain titles, believing he worked there. On one of his days in the Hobbit, he conveyor-belted 26 very short stories, which Stephen King later compared to a beat poem. If he needed to research a subject, he’d simply get up and browse the aisles. When people grew suspicious he was plotting out the stories in advance, he began soliciting starting points.

Carter’s was one. Four years later, at the Booksmith in San Francisco, Robin Williams gave him the springboard “Computer Vampyre.” Ellison, who disliked working with computers, grunted but wrote a story, “Keyboard,” anyway.

By rejecting the notion of writers as introverts, Ellison raised some charitable funds, brought attention to independent booksellers, and intensified his own reputation as an author who never once considered the act of writing as a mechanical exercise. The author is now 81 and still writes, though no longer while on display.  

Mob movie and Sopranos aficionados are likely well aware of organized crime’s common connection to trash collection or construction businesses (most specifically concrete—cement shoes, anyone?). But over the course of the mafia’s expansive history in the United States, their reach has extended far beyond what most people would imagine.

To create inroads into other industries without drawing much attention to themselves, crime families found creative ways to launder money and rule where one might least expect.

According to Gavin Schmitt, author of The Milwaukee Mafia: Mobsters in the Heartland, the mob had a hand in the dairy industry. “The Milwaukee guys owned Grande Cheese, a national cheese producer and distributor. The business was used for laundering money, and in the 1950s through the 1980s was strongly suspected of helping to import heroin, though nobody was ever charged,” he said. “In fact, the business was started by the Mafia around 1940 and several shareholders were murdered when it began. Today, there are still people who own it who were named by the FBI as being mob members, but it seems to be legit.”

Meyer Lansky II—the grandson of the infamous Meyer Lansky, one of the Mafia’s key players in the 1930s and beyond—admits his namesake had some unlikely businesses in his day. Lansky II, who shared his family history on AMC’s docuseries The Making of the Mob, explained his grandpa dabbled in jukeboxes in the ’40s. “He had a Wurlitzer distributing business that was in New York City,” Lansky said. “He had that for about a year or so, and he would distribute all over different neighborhoods in the area. They would lease it to the bars and establishments. They would create routes and build up routes.”

What does any jukebox need? Records, of course. Lansky II explained that his grandfather also found himself in the record business, as they supplied the LPs for the machines (as well as the service to maintain the jukeboxes). It was one-stop shopping, really. And he wasn’t the only Mafioso involved in the biz: The 1980s found some Mafia members purchasing record-pressing plants. They would make copies of recordings and sell them at bargain-basement prices.

“Milwaukee owned Del Chemical, which sold chemicals to municipalities throughout Wisconsin, Nevada and various other places,” Schmitt said. “The mobsters ran a simple scam: They overcharged by 10 percent and then Del paid this 10 percent back to the mayor as a kickback. Not only illegal, but it encouraged mayors to buy more chemicals than a city needed, because the bigger the purchase, the bigger the kickback.”

Chicago’s Mafia, best known as The Outfit, may have been based in the Windy City, but their power was strong in Tinseltown. They became partial owners of movie studios and even worked their way into motion picture labor unions, like the one for stagehands. In 1943, the Outfit was blatantly caught trying to extort the movie industry, and several of its members, including boss Paul “The Waiter” Ricca, were sent to jail, although he managed to walk after serving just three years.

Mafia-owned bars and restaurants were nothing new, but interestingly, they appeared to have a lock on New York City’s gay bar scene in the 1960s. A bar or restaurant serving gay patrons was deemed a “disorderly house” at the time, and the State Liquor Authority refused licenses to gay bars and revoked those who served gay customers alcohol. The Genovese crime family seized the opportunity to make money and cater to this spurned group, bribing law enforcement to ignore the happenings in their establishments, such as at the historic Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. Because they were operating under the radar, so to speak, these bars and clubs were cheaply run, serving weak drinks and offering little in the way of hygienic practices behind the bar.

According to Schmitt, the Milwaukee Mafia—who may just be the most innovative folks in organized crime—owned the Margaret L, the world’s largest tuna fishing boat in the 1970s, and Schmitt notes that it was purchased with stolen Teamsters money. Presumably, it also made their threats of swimming with the fishes more menacing. 

A version of this story originally ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2023. An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Meyer Lansky’s grandson as Meyer Lansky III.

People really do not like discussing moisture. A Buzzfeed post called “Why Moist Is The Worst Word Ever” received more than 4 million views; when The New Yorker asked readers to nominate a word to scrub from the English language in 2012, the overwhelming consensus was to ditch moist. The seemingly ordinary adjective inspires an excessive outpouring of ire. Why?

A group of psychologists decided to find out. Researchers from Oberlin College in Ohio and Trinity University in San Antonio ran three different experiments [PDF] to figure out how many people really find the word moist disdainful, and why. They found that around 20 percent of the population studied was averse to the word, but that it didn’t have anything to do with the way it sounds. Rather, it’s the association with bodily functions that seem to turn most people off, whether they realize it or not.

Most of the participants who told the researchers they hated the word chalked it up to phonics. “It just has an ugly sound that makes whatever you’re talking about sound gross,” one participant argued. However, people did not show similar aversions to words that utilize the same sounds, such as foist or rejoiced. People found the word moist most disgusting when it was accompanied by unrelated, positive words like paradise, or when it was accompanied by sexual words. By contrast, when it accompanied food words (like cake), people weren’t as bothered by it.

The younger and more neurotic the study participants were, the more likely they were to dislike the word. Additionally, the more disgust they associated with bodily functions, the less they liked moist. The researchers postulated that people who found themselves particularly grossed out by thinking of things as moist may just be more likely to associate the word with sex. As one participant explained, “It reminds people of sex and vaginas.” No disrespect to either, of course, but we’re pretty sure no one wants to think about those things when they’re browsing the baked goods aisle.

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

Are you a logophile? Do you want to learn unusual words and old-timey slang to make conversation more interesting, or discover fascinating tidbits about the origins of everyday phrases? Then get our new book, The Curious Compendium of Wonderful Words: A Miscellany of Obscure Terms, Bizarre Phrases, & Surprising Etymologies, out now! You can pick up your copy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, or Bookshop.org.

More than 150 million Scrabble games have been sold since Alfred Butts invented it in 1938. Every hour, approximately 30,000 people start a game, which you can buy in around 30 different languages. It has inspired countless fights about spelling and proper nouns, and has taught people how hard it is to use the letter q in a word if you lack access to a u as well.

But none of this would have happened had Butts not been a fan of Edgar Allan Poe.

In Poe’s short story “The Gold-Bug,” published in 1843, a character solves a cipher that is based on the popularity of English letters. “Now, in English, the letter which most frequently occurs is e. Afterwards, the succession runs thus: a o i d h n r s t u y c f g l m w b k p q x z,” he wrote.

While Poe wasn’t quite accurate with his assessment of the most and least popular letters, the idea of ranking letters by how much they’re used in the English language intrigued Butts. Because such a ranking didn’t actually exist, Butts created his own by tediously counting letters in the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and The Saturday Evening Post.

After tallying it all up in a complicated grid, Butts determined that the letters e, t, a, o, i, n, s, h, r, d, l, and u were used most frequently (they totaled 80 percent of letters typically used). Then, he devised his own word game.

Eventually, Butts acquired a partner who suggested several improvements to his concept, including the color scheme, the bonus for using all tiles in a single play, and new name: Scrabble.

Despite the multiple tweaks to name and gameplay, the game wasn’t massively popular until the chairman of Macy’s allegedly stumbled upon it while on vacation in 1952, then ordered thousands of sets for his stores. Scrabble has been a hit with word lovers and board game enthusiasts ever since, all thanks to a minor plot point in a nearly two-century-old short story. It’s a plot twist Poe probably never would have imagined. 

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

Are you a logophile? Do you want to learn unusual words and old-timey slang to make conversation more interesting, or discover fascinating tidbits about the origins of everyday phrases? Then pick up our new book, The Curious Compendium of Wonderful Words: A Miscellany of Obscure Terms, Bizarre Phrases, & Surprising Etymologies, out June 6! You can pre-order your copy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, or Bookshop.org.

As infrastructure goes, water towers are pretty picturesque. Some people turn them into houses once the city no longer needs them. The designers at Pop Chart Lab once created a visual ode to New York City’s water tower taxonomy. But why exactly does water need to be stored hundreds of feet above the city?

Most water towers are pretty simple machines. Clean, treated water is pumped up into the tower, where it’s stored in a large tank that might hold a million or so gallons—enough water to run that particular city for a day. When the region needs water, water pumps utilize the pull of gravity to provide high water pressure. Because they work with gravity, they have to be taller than the buildings they’re providing water to in order to reach the highest floors. Each additional foot of height in a water tower increases water pressure by .43 pounds per square inch.

Here’s a basic diagram of what a water tower system looks like:

Keeping water high off the ground plays another important role for a city infrastructure. It allows regions to use smaller water pumps.

In general, water demand for a city fluctuates throughout the day. Lots of folks are taking showers before work and school, but fewer people are running a lot of water at 3 a.m. Without a water tower, the municipality would have to buy a water pump big and powerful enough to keep up with peak demand in the mornings, which would then largely go to waste during less busy parts of the day for water usage (plus incur extra costs).

Instead, municipalities can buy a pump just large enough to satisfy the region’s average water demand for the day, and let the power of the water tower take over during the times with demand that exceeds the pump’s capabilities. When water demand goes down at night, the pump can replace the water in the tower. Also, if the power goes out and the city’s water pumps fail, the water tower can keep water running smoothly for at least 24 hours.

Go inside a water tower in Edmond, Oklahoma:

And in Bloomington, Minnesota:

And here’s a 1-million-gallon water tank getting cleaned:

While water towers generally seem like the product of a bygone era, they’re still very much relevant today. The Louisville Water Tower in Kentucky, built in 1860, is the oldest surviving water tower in the country, and it’s still in use. In New York City, millions of people still get water from water towers, though it’s one of the last large cities to rely on the system. Stored on top of tall buildings, these water towers provide the pressure for water to flow even if the electricity goes off (especially during a fire).

And, of course, one cannot discount the cultural importance of the water tower:

Every city deserves a skyscraper-sized civic monument to its favorite crop. Or beverage decanter.

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

Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss is a deceptively simple portrait of lust and love. But beyond that glittery gold leaf, the work is full of fascinating facts. 

Before creating The Kiss, Klimt had received scathing scorn in the first decade of the 20th century for his three-part University of Vienna Ceiling Paintings. Because of the nudity in these works, his interpretation of Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence were derided as “pornography” and “perverted excess,” and were ultimately rejected, wounding his reputation. 

In 1907, perhaps reeling from the poor reception of the Vienna Ceiling Paintings, Klimt was sketching furiously, but he doubted his work. He confessed in a letter, “Either I am too old, or too nervous, or too stupid—there must be something wrong.” But before long, he would begin the painting that would be his most popular.

Inspired by the Byzantine mosaics he’d seen on his travels, Klimt mingled gold leaf into his oil paints to create what would become his signature style.

The pose of the lovers depicted in The Kiss (Der Kuss in German) reflects the natural forms favored in the Vienna Art Nouveau (or Vienna Jugendstil) movement. But the simple forms and the bold patterns in the pair’s cloaks show the impact of the Arts and Crafts movement, while the use of spirals harkens back to Bronze Age art. 

The painter’s works mostly focused on women, so the inclusion of a man—albeit one whose face is obscured—was unusual for Klimt. The figures’ modest dress also marks this painting as one of Klimt’s more conservative creations.

Some art historians have theorized that the lovers seen lip-locked here are none other than the Austrian painter and his long-time partner, fashion designer Emilie Flöge, whom he had previously depicted in a portrait. 

As Artsper magazine notes, “the female figure could also be another of Klimt’s many muses or romantic conquests. As Klimt painted relentlessly, he also loved women relentlessly, and had many lovers over his lifetime.” Others have posited that The Kiss’s lovely lady was actually salon hostess and society woman Adele Bloch-Bauer, whom Klimt had painted for a Golden Period portrait in 1907. Still others have suggested the red hair is a clue that this is “Red Hilda,” the model Klimt employed for Danae, Lady with Hat and Feather Boa, and Goldfish. 

In 1908, the Austrian Gallery displayed The Kiss for the first time, even though Klimt hadn’t yet put the finishing touches on the work. Its unfinished state didn’t stop the Belvedere Museum (a.k.a. The Österreichische Galerie Belvedere) from adding it to their collection on the spot. 

How do you buy a work of art that hasn’t even been finished? You make an offer that can’t be refused. To acquire this transcendent piece of art, the Belvedere paid 25,000 crowns (or about $240,000 in 2011 dollars). Prior to this mammoth sale, the highest price paid for a painting in Austria was a relatively paltry 500 crowns.

Austria considers The Kiss a national treasure, and so the Viennese museum that has long been its home would never dream of selling it. However, if such a transaction were to happen, it’s predicted The Kiss would break sales records again. After all, Klimt’s less renowned (though still quite famous) Adele Bloch-Bauer I sold for $135 million in 2006. The New York Times noted at that time that it was “the highest sum ever paid for a painting.” (Several other paintings have since commanded larger sums, including Klimt’s own Water Serpents II.)

Klimt’s use of gold calls back to the kinds of religious art found in churches. Using gold leaf here to celebrate the earthly pleasures and sensuality of sexuality was considered by some to be profane. 

The Kiss measures 71 inches by 71 inches, nearly a 6-foot square. 

While Klimt’s original composition is a perfect square, the popularity of the painting spurred countless reproductions on posters, postcards, and other mementos. But these souvenirs regularly truncate the right and left sides of the painting to make for a more standard rectangular display.

In 2003, Austria released a commemorative 100 euro coin that had a etching of The Kiss on one side, and a portrait of Klimt at work in his studio on the other. 

Maybe it’s the grand scale. Maybe it’s the gold. But when re-assessing The Kiss for Klimt’s 150th birthday, journalist Adrian Brijbassi wrote, “The Kiss by Gustav Klimt surpasses expectations,” unlike that tiny and underwhelming Mona Lisa. 

After throwing shade on the more famous painting, Brijbassi explained, “[The Kiss] does what a great piece of art is supposed to do: Hold your gaze, make you admire its aesthetic qualities while trying to discern what’s beyond its superficial aspects.” Take that, Mona.

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

How can you tell jaguars and leopards apart? Both of the big cats are spotted, toothy, whiskered, and huge. But there are plenty of differences that can tip you off, including their anatomy, behavior, and geographic ranges.

Let’s start with their gorgeous patterned fur. Both felines are covered with large, flower-shaped blotches called rosettes. In jaguars (Panthera onca), these rosettes frequently contain little black spots. Leopard (Panthera pardus) rosettes don’t have those markings, and they tend to be larger.

The difference in head shape is another giveaway. A jaguar’s head is markedly bigger and broader. That’s because these particular cats, which have the strongest bite relative to body size of any feline, have an especially brutal method of killing prey. They drive their tough canine teeth straight through skull bones and into their victims’ brains. Leopards prefer suffocating their prey with a well-placed bite to the throat and then dragging the kill into a tree to eat in peace.

Compared side by side, leopards and jaguars show differences in overall body type as well. Leopards are much slimmer creatures with longer limbs and tails, looking comparatively sleek to the jaguars’ bulkier, barrel-shaped torsos.

Perhaps the biggest difference between jaguars and leopards is their geographic range. Jaguars are found only in the Western Hemisphere from northeastern Argentina to southern Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas (though U.S. sightings are rare). Leopards are now found in pockets of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, as far east as the Sea of Japan. However, the leopards’ historical range was much larger, covering all of sub-Saharan Africa as well as vast sections of the the Caucasus, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, China, and Southeast Asia.

Jaguars and leopards are adapted to different habitats as well. Jaguars live in forests, scrublands, swamps, and river valleys, usually around rivers or streams, and they’re good swimmers. Lightly built leopards live in savannas and grasslands, where they often climb trees to rest or scan for prey.

Both jaguars and leopards are members of the genus Panthera along with lions and tigers (collectively, the four are known as the ”roaring cats”). The term panther, however, usually describes either leopards or pumas.

Confusingly, only leopards and jaguars can be “black panthers.” They’re the only big cats known to exhibit melanism, an overabundance of the pigment melanin that gives them a charcoal tone and almost obscures their spots. The actual puma/panther (Puma concolor, also called a cougar, mountain lion, or catamount) does not experience melanism.

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

In 1954, computer scientist and brilliant mathematician Alan Turing died after biting into an apple laced with cyanide—a real-life version of Snow White and the poison apple.

It’s long been assumed that it was suicide, perhaps because he was frustrated and overwhelmed by the chemical castration the British government forced upon him after he admitted to having a sexual relationship with a man, which was against the law at the time. Some have speculated that Turing’s death-by-apple wasn’t necessarily intentional. He was known to be careless with his experiments, and accidentally inhaling cyanide or placing an apple in a cyanide puddle wouldn’t have been outside of the realm of possibilities. Others suggest that British Security Services considered Turing a high security risk because he was gay, and may have sabotaged him rather than risk the possibility that foreign agents would blackmail Turing to obtain government secrets.

Whatever happened, the fact remains that a half-eaten apple was found by Turing’s bedside. Fast forward about two decades to a few guys making personal computers in a garage. They had a name for their product and were now in need of a logo. The men were aware of Turing’s contributions to computers and coding, and decided to honor him and comment on his persecution by removing a single bite from the apple graphic they had picked to represent their company. And that’s how we got the iconic Apple logo on the back of all of our phones, computers, and watches.

So the story goes, anyway. But as compelling as it is, it simply isn’t true, according to the designer who created the logo, Rob Janoff. “I’m afraid it didn’t have a thing to do with it,” he said in 2009. “It’s a wonderful urban legend.” Janoff says the single bite out of the Apple logo originally served a very practical purpose: scale. The size of the bite showed that the shape was an apple, not a cherry or any other vaguely round fruit. Other theories—that the logo references Eve biting into the forbidden fruit or Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity—are also misguided.

If you’re curious about the multicolored stripes on early versions of the logo, there’s a very practical reason for those, too: “The Apple II was the first home or personal computer that could reproduce images on the monitor in color. So it represents color bars on the screen,” Janoff explained.

But that’s not to say that the idea of paying homage to Turing is something the creators of Apple were against. When actor Stephen Fry once asked his good friend Steve Jobs if the famous logo was based on Turing, Jobs replied, “God, we wish it were.”

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

A few facts about the 1985 comedy starring Chevy Chase as investigative reporter Irwin M. Fletcher.

Since 1974, mystery writer Gregory Mcdonald has written 11 novels featuring the character Irwin Maurice Fletcher. The most recent Fletch novel was written in 1994 (Mcdonald died in 2008).

Mcdonald rejected both Burt Reynolds and Mick Jagger before agreeing on Chevy Chase to play the title role.

Fletch star Chevy Chase has cited the comedy as his all-time personal favorite film of which he has been a part.

Director Michael Ritchie would shoot one take that stuck strictly to the script and then let Chase improvise for each additional take. Many of the improvised takes made it into the final movie.

Some examples include Ted Nugent, Babar, Igor Stravinsky, Gordon Liddy, Don Corleone, and Harry S. Truman.

In the poster, Fletch is disguised as a hockey player. Fletch was also supposed to go incognito as a relief pitcher for the L.A. Dodgers (featuring a cameo by then head coach Tommy Lasorda)—but that scene was cut, too.

With his long beard and roller skates, Fletch was meant to resemble the new age spiritual healer and guru Ram Dass (author of Be Here Now).

Her first was 1982’s Tootsie.

Chase was originally supposed to play Eric “Otter” Stratton in National Lampoon’s Animal House—a role that eventually went to Matheson.

The banquet that Fletch interrupts is being held for Fred Dorfman, the brother of Kent Dorfman (aka Flounder), one of the frat brothers from Animal House.

He provides the narration for the dream in which Fletch is a Lakers player.

This proved to be a headache for the cast and crew, causing the production to reschedule many scenes.

It was also used in The Godfather—for the famous horse head scene.

Ring any bells? It’s the spaceship from the 1979 sci-fi classic Alien. In fact Fletch wears the same hat that Harry Dean Stanton’s character wears throughout that movie.

Since then, rumors have swirled about various additional sequels, prequels, and reboots. The most famous is a prequel titled Fletch Won to be directed by Kevin Smith. While Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt, Will Smith, Jimmy Fallon, and Adam Sandler have all been linked to the title role, the film never materialized. Most recently, Saturday Night Live alum Jason Sudeikis has been rumored to play Fletch.

Thanks to Dogs Playing Poker, painter Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (a.k.a. C.M. Coolidge) has earned the dubious distinction of being called “the most famous American artist you’ve never heard of.” But while critics might sniff at his contribution to the art world, the history of his greatest works is rich. 

Coolidge’s earliest explorations of dog paintings were made for cigar boxes. Then, in 1903, the 59-year-old artist started working for the “remembrance advertising” company Brown & Bigelow. From there, he began churning out works like A Bold Bluff, Poker Sympathy, and Pinched With Four Aces, which were reproduced as posters, calendars, and prints, sometimes as parts of promotional giveaways.  

A Friend in Need pits a pair of bulldogs against five huge hounds. Who could blame them for slipping helpful cards under the table with their toes? As the most beloved of this series, A Friend In Need is also the one most often misnamed “Dogs Playing Poker.” 

Coolidge already had a quirky artistic claim to fame—he’s credited as the father of Comic Foregrounds, those carnival attractions where tourists can stick their heads atop a cartoon figure as a photo op. But with Dogs Playing Poker catching on through calendar and poster sales, Coolidge was able to sell some of the original paintings for $2000 to $10,000.

These painting, which were commissioned for commercial use, are regarded most often as kitsch, art that is basically bad to the bone. Recounting the highbrow opinion of these pieces, Poker News’s Martin Harris explained, “For some the paintings represent the epitome of kitsch or lowbrow culture, a poor-taste parody of ‘genuine’ art.” 

In the 1970s, kitsch was king, and demand for Dogs Playing Poker hit its peak—which made the pooches readily available in various affordable forms. Or, as art critic Annette Ferrara put it, “These signature works, for better or worse, are indelibly burned into the subconscious slide library of even the most un-art historically inclined person through their incessant reproduction on all manner of pop ephemera: calendars, t-shirts, coffee mugs, the occasional advertisement.”

Coolidge went by the nickname “Cash” and has been described as a hustler whose résumé showed quite a few career changes. Before he was painting for calendars, he worked painting street signs and houses and also tried his hand at being a druggist, an art teacher, and cartoonist. He also started his own bank and his own newspaper. So perhaps the pooches who are always looking for the angles represented Coolidge’s own ambitions.

A 1998 auction saw a Coolidge original sell for $74,000 at Sotheby’s. Then, in 2005, A Bold Bluff and Waterloo: Two were put up for auction in Doyle New York’s Dogs in Art Auction. Before they hit the block, predictions were made that the pair of rare paintings would fetch $30,000 to $50,000. But an anonymous bidder ultimately paid a whopping $590,400 for them. “A lot of people came to speculate on the piece, a lot of whom were outside our traditional area of collectors,” Alan Fausel, then the senior vice president of paintings at Doyle, told CNN. “It was a once in a lifetime opportunity.” In 2015, that record-breaking price was surpassed when Coolidge’s Poker Game sold for $658,000.

Auction notes from the Doyle event explain, “The [paintings’] sequential narrative follows the same ‘players’ in the course of a hand of poker. In the first (A Bold Bluff), our main character, the St. Bernard, holds a weak hand as the rest of the crew maintains their best poker faces. In the following scene (Waterloo: Two), we see the St. Bernard raking in the large pot, much to the very obvious dismay of his fellow players.”

Coolidge painted 16 pieces within this collection, but only nine of them actually show dogs playing poker. Higher Education displayed helmeted pups playing football. New Year’s Eve in Dogsville imagines a romantic soiree with dinner and dancing dogs. And Breach of Promise Suit showed a canine court. 

Coolidge was raised in Philadelphia, but the town was largely unaware of the fame of their former resident until 1991. That’s when his then-80-year-old daughter Gertrude Marcella Coolidge took it upon herself to travel to Philadelphia, New York, and give a print from his collection to the town. Today, the piece is framed and hangs within the one-room museum at the back of the local library. Visitors can also ask to see a thin folder of related Coolidge materials. 

In 2002, 92-year-old Gertrude told The New York Times that she and her mother were more cat people than dog lovers, but she admitted, “You can’t imagine a cat playing poker. It doesn’t seem to go.”

Maybe that sounds silly. What do plays like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Streetcar Named Desire have in common with these kitsch masterpieces? According to New York Times contributor James McManus, these works share similar views on sexual politics: “Men drink, bellow, smoke and play poker. The women who serve them … their game is to tame the bad boys.” 

For Williams, this means Maggie the Cat, Stella Kowalski, or her frail sister Blanche DuBois. For Coolidge, it means a cocktail-serving poodle, or a pair of terriers breaking up the game.

The works of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Georges de La Tour, and Paul Cézanne are often cited as influences on how Coolidge posed his canine card players. 

Popularity and prestige don’t always come hand in hand. Art critics have long sneered at the commissioned works Coolidge undertook. Even his 1934 obituary described his greatest artistic accomplishment as “painted many pictures of dogs.” But a low blow was delivered one April Fool’s Day when the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, posted a prank in the form of a press release proclaiming the institution wanted to exhibit Dogs Playing Poker. 

Chrysler Director William Hennessey was quoted as saying, “There’s long been a spirited debate in scholarly circles about the position of canine art within the canon. I believe it is now time for these iconic images to assume their rightful place on the walls of our institutions where homo-centric art has too long been unjustly privileged.”

This praise was followed by an addendum: “EDITOR’S NOTE: April Fool! Every word printed above is true with the single exception of the suggestion that the Chrysler is actually trying to obtain these paintings.”

Coolidge’s paintings have popped up everywhere from classic TV shows like Cheers (Sam is a fan), The Simpsons (Homer is not, as you can see in the clip above), and Rosanne to the cover of Rush’s 1981 album Moving Pictures, which features A Friend in Need to shows like The Suite Life of Zack and Cody and Boy Meets World.

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

The days are long, the weather is warm … time to fire up the grill! In 2015, we asked Myron Mixon—a.k.a. the winningest man in barbeque, who started cooking with his dad when he was just 9 and has earned more than 1800 trophies in his career—for some tips to help you nail it this barbecue season.

Barbecuing isn’t as easy as throwing some meat on a grill. “It is important to research and understand the process,” Mixon said. When he first started in competitions, he had only trial and error to guide him; now, there are many avenues available to the novice BBQ chef. “There is so much information out there,” he said. “Read cookbooks, take classes, search the Internet, watch shows. It will make you a better pitmaster.” It also helps to have a working knowledge of your equipment, so don’t be afraid to read the user’s manual.

“Prepping is very important in barbecuing,” Mixon said. It encompasses everything from selecting the cut and quality of your meat to how you cut up that meat to flavoring your future meal with seasoning and marinades. How well you prep, he said, directly translates to how delicious your meal is: “Great prep, great barbecue.”

A meat thermometer is a must, for one very simple reason: “The most common mistake made in barbecuing is undercooking or overcooking,” Mixon said. “The best cooks use an internal meat thermometer to make sure the product is cooked perfectly.”

Mixon likes vinegar-based sauces on pork, mustard-based sauces on poultry, and tomato-based spicy sauce on beef. “[Avoid] any sauce that’s so overpowering that it masks the natural flavor of the meat,” he cautioned.

“A little twist to flavors for your barbecue can be as simple as adding puréed fresh fruit to the sauce before being applied to the meat,” Mixon said. He recommends things like blueberries, strawberries, and applesauce.

“For me, BBQ is a simple food with simple ingredients and the process is easy,” Mixon said. “My [side] dishes are the same.” He makes his mom’s fish slaw, which is made of coarse cut cabbage, diced tomatoes and onions, mayo, salt and pepper, and his peach BBQ beans, which he creates using baked beans, peach pie filling, and red bell peppers.

The one thing to remember when you’re making barbecue, Mixon said, is to “always cook and flavor the barbecue the way you, the pitmaster, like it. Your grill, your yard, your way.”

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

There aren’t many frontiers left on Earth. Explorers have scaled the world’s tallest mountains and taken samples from Antarctica’s deepest subglacial lakes. You can even visit remote locales from your web browser. And yet, some corners of the Earth still remain essentially uncharted by Western travelers or scientists (though that certainly doesn’t mean people don’t live there or know the landscape). Here are some of the coolest, less-explored places around the globe.

This region, home to at least 14 of the Amazon’s uncontacted tribes, is one of the most isolated places in the world by design. An estimated 2000 Indigenous people live in an area about the size of Austria, and the tribes’ right to live in isolation is protected by a Brazilian government agency charged with preventing outsiders from visiting Indigenous territories.

Home to temperate rainforests, glaciers, fjords, and hot springs, northern Patagonia is one of Chile’s wildest landscapes. It’s the country’s most sparsely populated region and has only been accessible by highway since the ‘80s. The Northern Patagonian Ice Field remains one of the largest masses of ice outside the polar regions, though, like many South American glaciers, it is shrinking due to climate change.

Russia’s eastern peninsula is home to some of the most spectacular volcanic activity on Earth, with more than 300 volcanoes, including one that has been erupting continuously since 1996. It’s also home to the most diverse range of salmon species and is the most densely populated brown bear habitat in the world. The region was closed to Westerners until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and even before that, only 400,000 Soviet residents (all with military clearances) were allowed to live in the territory, which is around the size of California.

Scientists didn’t delve into this submarine trench in the South Pacific seafloor off the eastern coast of Australia until the end of 2013. When researchers from the UK and New Zealand sent underwater robots into this crack in the ocean floor almost 4.5 miles below the surface, they found prawns and eels totally unlike those found in other deep-sea trenches.

Many of the subtropical forests located on the steep slopes of the easternmost stretch of the Himalayas are virtually untouched by human activity. They’re important areas for wildlife: Deep within the forests in Myanmar’s Kachin State lies the largest tiger preserve in the world. It’s also home to bears, red pandas, and gibbons.

Named for the unique, massive limestone formations known as tsingy (Malagasy for “walking on tiptoes”), this 600-square-mile national park and wilderness preserve is located on Madagascar’s western edge. The labyrinth of jagged, needle-shaped limestone was formed by erosion over a period of millions of years, and the resulting habitat of gorges, canyons, and forests is a natural fortress. A huge number of species of plants and animals are endemic to the region, meaning they’re not found anywhere else on Earth, and there are plenty that haven’t even been discovered yet. While its southern tip is open to the public, much of the reserve is off-limits to tourists.

This isolated region in western Papua New Guinea contains the Hindenburg Wall, a network of limestone plateaus more than a mile high. The 30-mile-long series of bluffs features nearly undisturbed ecosystems high above the ground. A 2013 biological survey of the area found 1108 animal and plant species, almost 100 of which were new to science [PDF].

The Namib is estimated to be the world’s oldest desert, and it’s one of the driest, least-populated places in the world. Dunes dominate the southern part of the harsh desert, and there are few paved roads. At 1256 feet tall, the giant Dune 7 is believed to be the tallest sand dune in the world.

The Siberian Sakha Republic (also called Yakutia) covers one-fifth of Russia, roughly equivalent to the size of India, with a large swath of the territory located above the Arctic Circle. Its climate is one of the world’s most extreme: Average high temperatures in January are as low as -32°F, and most of the land is covered by permafrost. Lichen and moss make it a favorite habitat of reindeer. Though mining has taken its toll on the region’s pristine wilderness, parts of it remain untouched, like the Lena River Delta, a gorgeous refuge and breeding ground for wildlife.

Though Vikings landed in Greenland around 1000 CE, and Indigenous Greenlanders have lived on its coasts for millennia, we’re still discovering parts of the far-northern region. Melting glaciers continue to reveal new islands. Roughly 80 percent of the island is covered by a massive ice sheet more than a mile thick in places, making interior Greenland largely inaccessible as well as uninhabitable.

This almost 8000-foot-tall peak is the largest of a series of mountains that have developed much like separate islands, with very different species making their homes on the different peaks. In 2014, a group of biologists and rock climbers teamed up to conduct fieldwork in the region, where rock climbing is sometimes the only way to get to unexplored habitats.

New Zealand’s largest national park was shaped by glaciers and contains some of the country’s oldest rocks. The vast wilderness is home to a unique diversity of animals, like the takahē, a flightless endemic bird thought to be extinct for decades until it was rediscovered in the park in 1948, and the kākāpō, the world’s only flightless, nocturnal parrot. Fiordland’s 2.9 million acres are some of the wildest lands in the Southern Hemisphere.

Walled off by forbidding granite boulders piled hundreds of feet high, Cape Melville is only around 900 miles from Brisbane, one of Australia’s biggest cities—but the rainforest habitat might as well be a world away. Virtually inaccessible except by helicopter, scientists discovered three new-to-science species of animals in the area in 2013.

The world’s largest cave contains its own river and even a jungle. At more than 5.5 miles long, it’s cavernous enough to house a skyscraper. The first expedition set off to explore this underground world in 2009 before being stymied by a 200-foot-tall wall of calcite inside. Much of the surrounding network of over 150 caves near the Laos border remains unsurveyed.

Located in the middle of the Bay of Bengal off the southernmost tip of Myanmar, North Sentinel Island technically belongs to India, but few outsiders have dared to make contact with the Sentinelese people. The inhabitants, who vigorously refuse contact with the wider world, have lived there for more than 55,000 years. There’s a three-mile exclusion zone surrounding the island, where somewhere between 50 and 300 people are believed to live.

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

We can’t actually hear someone chortle or guffaw through the internet, but we still want to express our emotions. Luckily, internet residents have come up with a whole slew of ways to convey laughter online. Here are 16 of them.

One way to laugh online that’s gaining popularity is IJBOL, which means “I just burst out laughing” (it’s pronounced “eej-bowl”). “The term,” The New York Times explains, “is not necessarily novel or different from how other iterations of internet laughter are used, but it describes something people actually do: explode into an audible, full-belly guffaw.” IJBOL may date back to 2009, but according to Dictionary.com, “it was rarely used” then. Its resurgence began within the K-pop community in 2021, which led many to assume it was a Korean term. IJBOL is currently a favorite of Gen Zers and frequently appears on social media platforms like TikTok.

The classic acronym for laughing out loud (it may once have meant “lots of love” or “little old lady,” but it doesn’t anymore). However, lol has been around long enough now—more than 30 years—that it doesn’t really mean out-loud laughter either—linguist John McWhorter says it now indicates empathy. For genuine laughter, make sure to emphasize it somehow: all-caps LOL is a good start, or try one of the longer variants below. (Lol doesn’t count as emphasis; it’s probably just autocorrect.)

When we treat lol as just a word rather than an acronym, it means that we can change things about the letters just to indicate a different pronunciation, and without trying to come up with something they stand for. Changing the vowel, as in lel and lawl, indicates a more laid-back, less-laugh-y response, whereas repeating part of the word, as in lollll and lololol, indicates more actual laughter. And the combination of all-caps and reduplication—LOLOLOLOL—is the most likely to be genuine laughter of all the lol-variants, the more -OLs the better.

It’s not just lol—there are other acronyms indicating laughter, such as lmao, lmfao, rotfl, rotflol for laughing my ass off, rolling on the floor laughing (out loud), and of course they can also be capitalized for emphasis. Lmao and lmfao are still relatively common, but while ROTFLOL had a great cameo in Weird Al’s “White and Nerdy,” it and rotfl have gotten rarer—these days, you’re more likely to see rofl with the word the omitted, or the rofl emoji.

Lollerskates, lollercoaster, loltastic, roflcopter—these words are fantastically creative, but like rofl, they seem pretty vintage early 2000s. Perhaps they’re due for an ironic revival? Another expansion is lulz, but it’s more of a noun than an emotive response: You can do something for the lulz or say that “much lulz were had.”

More Articles About Phrases and Sayings:

Another classic laughter expression that, like lol, has weakened through repeated use. Plain haha or autocorrected Haha are sufficient for mild amusement, but for true laughter, go for all-caps HAHA or one of the expansions below.

You can go shorter, for less amusement (ha, aha, heh), or longer, for greater amusement (hahahaha, bahaha, ahaha). You can also vary the consonant (bahaha, gahaha) or the vowel (heh, hehe, heehee). Typos, like ahha or hahahaah, may indicate you’re laughing too hard to type properly. Caps, as ever, for emphasis. Combining them is not common (you’ve likely never seen *behehe or *ahehahe or *abaha, and even BAHAHA is rarer than HAHAHA).

Fairly straightforward: evil or mock-evil is expressed as a variant on mwahaha or muahahah, with the usual caveats about reduplication of ha and all-caps for emphasis.

Other languages use repetitions of different symbols, such as Spanish jajajaja (that’s the “j” sound as in jalapeño), Thai 5555 (the number 5 is pronounced “ha”), or Korean ㅋㅋㅋㅋ (pronounced “kkkk”—vowels are only written for louder laughter). A few languages also have their own acronyms, such as French mdr (mort de rire, “dying of laughter”).

You can also choose to transcribe what you’re doing in the third person, almost as if you were giving stage directions of yourself. Some platforms may automatically turn g into a “grins” emoji, but you can also write longer versions like *laughs* or *laughs uncontrollably* or *spits water on keyboard*. This style is less common with laughter though, and more common with emotions that are hard to draw and don’t have onomatopoeia, such as *sighs heavily* or  or #headdesk.