Archive
All Stories.
Science, finance, scams, politics and extraordinary lives. The newest stories appear first.
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He Made Himself Ill to Overturn a Medical Certainty
A doctor swallowed a bacterium to answer a question that sounded absurd at the time: could it really live in the stomach?
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When the Markets Started Selling Without Knowing What to Sell
Some securities briefly traded for a penny. The Flash Crash was neither a simple outage nor the work of one person.
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The Phantom Army That Kept Hitler Away from Normandy
Double agents, radio traffic and a fictional army kept alive the idea that the real invasion was still coming somewhere else.
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He Took His Captors’ Ship to Free His Family
He knew the forts’ signals, wore the captain’s hat and had to take sixteen people out of Confederate Charleston.
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The Dam That Held While the Mountain Killed the Valley.
In 1963, the Vajont Dam stayed standing. The disaster came from the mountain above the lake, and from the wave it threw into the valley…
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The Genius Fund That Kept Winning Until Wall Street Trembled.
LTCM looked like finance at its smartest. Then one highly leveraged idea started to threaten Wall Street itself.
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The Rigged Sale of the Eiffel Tower
Victor Lustig never owned the Eiffel Tower. In 1925, he still managed to sell it by making an absurd lie feel like a confidential government…
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The Man Who Chose to Enter the Place Everyone Wanted to Flee.
In 1940, Witold Pilecki allowed himself to be arrested so he could infiltrate Auschwitz. He entered to organize, observe and report.
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The day the United States detonated a nuclear bomb in space
On the night of July 8, 1962, people in Hawaii watched the sky turn colors as if it had opened above them. The explosion was…
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The Lake That Swallowed a Drilling Platform
On November 20, 1980, a drill jammed beneath a shallow Louisiana lake. Minutes later, a 150-foot rig tipped into the water. Beneath the lake, miners…
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His cargo ship sank in two minutes. For him, the story was only beginning.
In November 1942, Poon Lim reached a raft after his ship was torpedoed. It carried water, food—and one terrible fact: none of it meant he…
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A dead man washed ashore carrying Allied secrets. None of it had happened by chance.
On April 30, 1943, a body was found near Huelva, Spain. The man wore a British uniform, carried a briefcase, and seemed to have left…