Mark Twain’s weird but perfect ending
The night Twain was born, there was a brilliant view of Halley's Comet flying right over his hometown.
Dr. Howard Markel
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How Galileo’s groundbreaking works got banned
Born on this day 458 years ago, Galileo refused to be silent about how the solar system worked.
Inventor Louis Braille touched lives with literacy
Braille first encountered an early predecessor to his tactile writing system in 1821, while he was still an adolescent.
When Diego Rivera used his brush to honor groundbreaking healers
For Mexico's National Institute of Cardiology, the artist portrayed a pantheon of heart doctors.
How Irving Berlin’s blue skies turned to blue days
Irving Berlin has no place in American music; he is American music," legendary composer Jerome Kern once wrote. Yet for…
How the talented Oscar Levant broke taboos by talking about mental health
In today's socially mediated 24/7 news cycle, it is difficult to imagine just how taboo the topic of prescription opiate…
A childhood accident didn’t impair James Thurber’s comic vision
This minor genius of mirth lost his left eye at the age of 6.
The sexual assault case that shocked Hollywood almost a century ago
On Sept. 9, 1921, a young actress named Virginia Rappe died of a ruptured urinary bladder, days after a Labor…
How mental health struggles wrote Ernest Hemingway’s final chapter
On a Sunday morning, the famed writer awoke early in a discombobulated and distressed mood. The rest is literary history…
‘One day they simply weren’t there.’ How researchers reconstructed Anne Frank’s last months
Today would have been the 91st birthday of Anne Frank, the girl who left behind a tattered, hidden diary, now…
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