Culture & entertainment
Discover facts about culture & entertainment. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Culture & entertainment
Agatha Christie secretly wrote romance novels
For more than 20 years, Christie published bittersweet romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, keeping her identity secret from the public.
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Jane Austen published her novels without her name
Sense and Sensibility appeared as “By a Lady,” while Pride and Prejudice was credited to “The Author of Sense and Sensibility.” Her identity became public…
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Why theatrical green rooms aren't usually green
The term’s origin is disputed: it may refer to young or unprepared actors, or to green baize cloth once used to protect costumes.
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Storm was assembled from two abandoned superhero ideas
Dave Cockrum and Len Wein combined a cat-themed woman's visual design with the weather powers of a proposed male character called Typhoon. The unused pieces…
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Goku's victories don't always end with Goku killing the villain
Dragon Ball Z repeatedly separates winning a fight from delivering the final death. Other characters finish enemies, opponents survive, and some return for…
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F. Scott Fitzgerald was terrible at spelling
Fitzgerald’s manuscripts were riddled with typos, and even Hemingway mocked his spelling.
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Why Hunan banned Alice in Wonderland
In 1931, Hunan's governor banned the book because he believed that putting animals on the same conversational level as humans insulted humanity.
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez pawned appliances to mail his novel
When he finished One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez and his wife couldn’t afford postage to send the whole manuscript to Argentina. They…
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Travel influencers frequently photoshop themselves
Some use editing tools to place themselves in picturesque locations, making a photo taken at home look like a rainforest adventure.
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The murder mystery that has run since 1952
Agatha Christie expected it to run for only eight months, but The Mousetrap has played in London's West End since 1952, with only a brief pandemic-era pause.…
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Sailor Moon’s creator married another manga legend
Naoko Takeuchi, creator of Sailor Moon, is married to Yoshihiro Togashi, creator of Hunter x Hunter and Yu Yu Hakusho. They have occasionally referenced each…
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A novelist built an entire book around avoiding E
Ernest Vincent Wright's 1939 Gadsby runs to about 50,000 words under a rule that excludes English's most common letter. The constraint blocks obvious choices…
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Les Misérables takes nineteen chapters to visit Waterloo
Hugo devotes an entire book within the novel to the battle, moving through the terrain, the armies and the aftermath. The detour eventually connects back to…
Discover moreIron Man was created to make readers root for a weapons tycoon
Stan Lee challenged himself to make 1960s anti-war teenagers root for Tony Stark, a wealthy weapons manufacturer—and it worked.
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Kafka's friend disobeyed him—and saved his unpublished novels
Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to destroy his unpublished manuscripts unread, but Brod published them after Kafka's death, helping make him one of the 20th…
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Flat Stanley began with a bedtime what-if
Jeff Brown's son wondered what would happen if the bulletin board above his bed fell on him. Brown turned that question into a boy who survives being…
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A typo gave Coraline its name
Neil Gaiman meant to type “Caroline” but accidentally typed “Coraline.” He liked the typo’s strange sound and built a dark fantasy novella around it.
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National Geographic’s first issue had no photographs
The magazine launched in 1888 with a scholarly-looking collection of reports and articles. The vivid photography now associated with its identity came later.…
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Kerouac typed On the Road on a 120-foot scroll
He taped tracing paper into one long sheet so he could type for three weeks without stopping to change paper. The scroll still exists and occasionally tours…
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Dostoevsky dictated The Gambler against a brutal deadline
His publishing contract threatened to give Stellovsky years of rights to new work without payment if he missed the deadline. Stenographer Anna Snitkina helped…
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Proust lined his bedroom with cork to quiet Paris
At his Boulevard Haussmann apartment, cork helped damp the street noise around the room where he worked. He wrote at night, often in bed, while creating In…
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Ibsen wrote an ending he called a barbaric outrage
Actress Hedwig Niemann-Raabe refused to play Nora leaving her children in A Doll's House. Ibsen supplied an alternative for German performances in which…
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Herodotus wrote about giant ants and flying snakes
His accounts included giant gold-digging ants and flying snakes—proof that outlandish travel tales are nothing new.
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Elizabethan stages completely banned women from performing
Women were barred from the professional stage, so boys played female roles in Shakespeare's time, including Juliet and Lady Macbeth.
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