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A Trail Gone Cold
Iceland is known to the rest of the world as the land of Vikings and volcanos, an island caught between continents at the extremities of the map. Remote and comparatively inhospitable, it was set...
Breaking a Bit
It’s been a busy summer, and the large shortfall in donations last month has been demoralizing, so we’re taking a week off to rest and recuperate. The curated links section will be (mostly) s...
Giving the Bird the Bird
We’re not going to post things on Twitter X anymore. The new owner keeps doing awful stuff . If you have enjoyed our mostly-daily curated links via the aforementioned collapsing service, we ...
Journey to the Invisible Planet
In the late 17th century, natural philosopher Isaac Newton was deeply uneasy with a new scientific theory that was gaining currency in Europe: universal gravitation. In correspondence with a scie...
https://www.damninteresting.com/journey-to-the-invisible-planet/
From Where the Sun Now Stands
An American Indian man on horseback stood outlined against a steely sky past midday on 05 October 1877. Winter was already settling into the prairies of what would soon become the state of Montan...
https://www.damninteresting.com/from-where-the-sun-now-stands/
The Ancient Order of Bali
In the 1970s, the Indonesian island of Bali went through a period of rapid change. Along the stunning beaches on the southern side of the island, tourism boomed. Parking lots were put up, togethe...
This is Dang Interesting
Happy New Year! This has nothing to do with the new year. We at this website know, reluctantly, that “d*mn” is not always a welcome word. Additionally, we are aware that we have a few artic...
Lofty Ambitions
One summer day in 1933, in a brief pocket of time between the two World Wars, a British man named Maurice Wilson clutched the stick of his tiny, open air biplane and watched his fuel gauge dwindl...
The Rube’s Dilemma
It all started with a hat. A straw boater, to be precise, with a flat, round brim and brightly colored ribbon tied around the crown. Originally popularized by gondoliers in Venice, this jaunty ac...
Devouring the Heart of Portugal
On the morning of Thursday, 04 December 1924, a tall and well-dressed Dutch trader named Karel Marang strolled along Great Winchester Street in the City of London, among the bustling crowds of ba...
https://www.damninteresting.com/devouring-the-heart-of-portugal/
The Mount St. Helens Trespasser
The Washington state deputy sheriff looked suspiciously at the motorcycle strapped to the back of the odd little French car. The motorcycle was a recently repaired Honda 90, sporting a fresh coat...
https://www.damninteresting.com/the-mount-st-helens-trespasser/
Hunting For Kobyla
On a January day in 1964, something remarkable happened: Simon Wiesenthal took the afternoon off. He parked himself at a table on the terrace of Tel Aviv’s Café Roval, soaking up the sunshine ...
The Unceasing Cessna Hacienda
Warren “Doc” Bayley was a man of the people. When he and his wife Judy opened their Las Vegas resort in 1956, Bayley had no plans to compete with the flashier, corporate casinos at the center...
https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unceasing-cessna-hacienda/
The Kingpin of Shanghai
Respectable heads of state rarely admit to keeping company with gangsters. But in April 1927, about 15 years after the collapse of the last imperial dynasty, Chiang Kai-shek and China were at a c...
To Hell With Facebook
The earliest known version of the idiom “the straw that broke the camel’s back” was written by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury in 1677, though it was concerned with hors...
Capital, Punished
Located 350 km (217 miles) southeast of Puerto Rico, the British island of Montserrat is sometimes called ‘The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean’ for its verdancy and early Irish settlers. Howeve...
The Traveler and His Baggage
On 19 May 1943, a news report from Berlin deepened the already dreary gloom that clung to the people of Nazi-occupied Paris. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels proudly announced to the world tha...
https://www.damninteresting.com/the-traveler-and-his-baggage/
A Taste of Italy
In the mid-1800s, Italy was consumed by two parallel fights: one to rid itself of Austrian domination (a holdover from the Holy Roman Empire) and the other for unification. At the time, Europe’...
Fifteen Years Forsaken
Editor’s Note: This article contains quotations from contemporaneous accounts which might be offensive for today’s readers. The moon was new on the night of 31 July 1761, and the wide expan...
Pushing the Envelope
As is often the case with people in dangerous professions, the Apollo astronauts found that life insurance policies were prohibitively expensive. Rather than pay the exorbitant insurance fees, th...