“Every Breath You Take” gets played at weddings all over the world — but Sting…
The world's most-played wedding song is actually a chilling portrait of obsession that Sting has spent four decades trying to convince us to hear.
Curiosities
Biology, geology, deep ocean, evolution, and natural-world facts. Cross-domain wonder pieces.
86 articles · Curiosities
Dolly Parton said no when Elvis Presley’s manager demanded half of “I Will Always…
A songwriter's refusal to surrender half her song's rights to Elvis Presley's manager cost her nothing and earned her everything.
Kurt Cobain thought “Smells Like Teen Spirit” sounded like a line about…
A drunk joke about deodorant became the title of rock's most consequential song, reshaping how an entire generation understood itself.
Sylvester Stallone could not secure “Another One Bites the Dust” for “Rocky III,”…
A rejected Queen song led Stallone to call an unknown band, launching one of the decade's biggest hits and proving that sometimes the best creative accidents come from being told no.
“Donnie Darko” struggled to find a distributor, then opened six weeks after 9/11…
A haunted teenager, a mysterious rabbit, and a jet engine through a bedroom ceiling arrived in theaters six weeks after 9/11, making one of cinema's most prescient disasters completely unsellable.
J.K. Rowling’s editor at Bloomsbury told her she would never make money out of…
The editor who backed Harry Potter gave its author terrible advice—and he was almost completely right.
The Shawshank Redemption failed at the box office and lost all seven Oscars it was…
How a box-office disappointment became a beloved film through VHS rentals, cable reruns and IMDb users’ enduring No. 1 ranking.
Gold can be forged in neutron-star mergers, but astronomers are still working out…
Gold is r-process material older than the Sun. Neutron-star mergers are a demonstrated source, but NASA-backed magnetar research and other possible sites remain in play, and individual atoms cannot be assigned to one cosmic event.
At the peak of Zimbabwe’s 2008 meltdown, prices doubled roughly every day. The…
When a government prints money faster than prices can rise, the only winner is the black market.
For most of history the world’s largest economy was not in Europe or America but…
The West's economic dominance is surprisingly recent—a mere century of advantage after millennia of Eastern superiority.
In 1887, a Scottish veterinarian named John Boyd Dunlop watched his son bounce…
How a Scottish vet's improvised rubber tube — built in a Belfast garden shed to stop his son's cycling headaches in 1887 — became the passive suspension system every wheeled vehicle on Earth still uses.
Scientists spent decades treating Olympus Mons as a dead volcano, a frozen relic…
Olympus Mons on Mars is 22 kilometres tall and 600 kilometres wide, with slopes so shallow that a person standing on it would see only flat ground to the horizon. The geometry of the largest volcano in the solar system defeats human perception.