This week we’re lucky to have Elizabeth Lunday, author of Secret Lives of Great Artists: What Your Teachers Never Told You about Master Painters and Sculptors guest blogging with us. Every day this week, she’ll be spilling the dirt on the artists you thought you knew. We’ll let her...

by Andrew Ward You might not know how to play. But that shouldn’t stop you from learning how to deal with cricket’s most common problems. Like: what to do when a monkey keeps interrupting play. And who to bet on when you’re watching a team of one-armed players take on a team of one-legged play...

BY BRIAN KEVIN As soon as he became the first director of the National Park Service in 1917, millionaire borax magnate Stephen Mather promoted the parks as the ultimate social equalizers, places “accessible alike to the poor and to the rich.� According to Mather, the Parks were places where iden...

This week we’re lucky to have guest blogger Courtney Humphries blogging with us. Courtney is the author of Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan…And the World and she’s got 5 great posts on pigeons. We’ll let her take it from here: Pigeons are ubiquitous, so common we hard...

Editor’s Note: The deadline for our $50,000 Tuition Giveaway is January 31. Rather than nag you every day with a post that starts and ends with “TIME IS RUNNING OUT,” we’ve decided to keep the scholarship top of mind by re-running some of our favorite college-centric stories ...

BY DAVID CLARK While they had plenty of other culinary talents, the Native Americans were not a cheese-making people. It was the pilgrims who brought cheese and cows with them on the Mayflower and got the whole thing started this side of the pond. Most early American cheeses were made at home, to be...

mental_floss477:http://blogs.static.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/21425.html BY DAVID CLARK Ed note: This week we’re proud to have cheese expert and historian David Clark guest blogging with us. Today, he’s reporting on three huge cheeses gifted to America’s elected leaders, and the r...

By Steven Otfinoski As far as Christmas carols go, you’ve got three basic archetypes: songs about Jesus, songs about baby Jesus and songs about snowy weather. Then, tossed in with a lovable snowman, is poor King Wenceslas. Because he’s jumbled into this mix, some might walk away thinking the goo...

In 2003, Dave Isay created StoryCorps to record intimate interviews between loved ones and friends. In 2007, StoryCorps published 50 of their favorite stories in the New York Times best-seller Listening Is an Act of Love . We’ll let them take it from here: Around twenty-five years ago, scienti...

By Adam K. Raymond Misspelling album titles is one of the grandest traditions in music. From The Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle released in 1968 to Ghostface Killah’s The Big Doe Rehab released in 2007, misspelling titles, intentionally or not, transcends time and genre. Here are 10 of our ...