
In October 1928, Virginia Woolf delivered two lectures to the women students of Cambridge University. A year later she published them as a single essay. Ninety-six years on, the argument she made that evening — that literature had been catastrophically impoverished by the doors shut on women — has never been seriously refuted

Scientists have calculated that an average human would need a wingspan of at least 6.7 metres — roughly 22 feet — to generate enough lift to fly. That's the wingspan of a small aircraft. And wings would be the least of your problems.

The internet has invented a dozen versions of Keanu Reeves — viral stories that are touching but fabricated. The verified truth is more interesting than any of them. And it involves a private foundation he has never put his name on, a house he sold to be closer to his sister, and twelve Harley-Davidsons

Mount St. Helens shook for two months and recorded more than 10,000 earthquakes before it exploded. The pressure had been building for 123 years. The science of why volcanoes don't erupt immediately turns out to be one of the most precise explanations in nature for why nothing that eventually breaks does so without warning.

In 1957, a psychologist named Leon Festinger proved that human beings will rewrite reality rather than admit they are wrong. History's greatest cover-ups didn't happen because powerful people were uniquely evil. They happened because the human brain was designed to protect itself from a very specific kind of pain

The idea that the rich have an obligation to give away their wealth is not modern. It is not progressive. It is not radical. It is older than Christianity, older than Rome, and it was articulated most bluntly by the richest man in America in 1889, who wrote that dying wealthy was a disgrace.

In 1960s Atlanta, Walter and Betty Lou Roberts ran the only integrated children's theater in the South. When the Ku Klux Klan blew up a car outside their show, Walter Roberts called intermission and carried on. This is the story that happened before a famous daughter was born.
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