Culture & entertainment
Discover facts about culture & entertainment. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Culture & entertainment
Guild Wars 2 features completely dynamic map events
Instead of standing still and handing out static quests, non-playable characters actively wander the world and get into trouble. If you ignore a bandit raid,…
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Blowing smoke directly into guest faces
Respecting personal space was completely optional in early talk formats. A notoriously aggressive daytime host would deliberately blow thick cigarette smoke…
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Why journalists put the most important facts first
Journalists love to pretend that the inverted pyramid writing style was a stroke of narrative genius. In reality, early reporters used telegraphs that charged…
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Titanic reused digital passengers again and again
Why pay hundreds of background actors when you can just copy and paste them? James Cameron used motion capture on merely 40 actors to generate the thousands…
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Reality show contestants are isolated from the world
Spending weeks in a gorgeous villa sounds like a dream vacation until the intense isolation sets in. Participants are entirely stripped of their phones,…
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Why theme-park lines zigzag
If you saw a straight line of ten thousand people, you'd walk away. Switchbacks create a psychological illusion of constant progress, tricking your brain into…
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Heroic quests require mandatory initial stubborn refusal
Answering the call of destiny on the very first try is considered incredibly tacky. Heroes must staunchly refuse the glowing magic sword and insist they just…
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Why butterflies are chilled before photographs
Insects do not care about framing. To get a butterfly to rest peacefully on a beautiful flower without immediately flying away, wranglers place them in a…
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A wire brush can sound like a steam train
Classic steam locomotives have a rhythmic, heavy chugging sound that is notoriously difficult to capture cleanly in the wild. A much simpler solution involves…
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Why tarot decks have 78 cards
Unlike standard fifty-two card games, traditional tarot demands an unwieldy stack of seventy-eight cards, including a massive dedicated trump suit. Trying to…
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Why sound artists are called Foley artists
Imagine your highly specialized career being permanently named after some dude named Jack. Jack Foley was a studio employee who pioneered the art of adding…
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Why radio stations save the forecast for last
You always have to wait through three terrible songs to get the forecast. Broadcasters know that weather and traffic are the only essential information you…
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Why Mister Rogers started announcing the fish feeding
Sometimes the sheer wholesomeness of television history is aggressively upsetting to cynical people. Early in the run of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, a young…
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Shaggy's real name is Norville Rogers
You really have to appreciate the audacity of naming a guy who constantly talks to a dog and eats six-foot-tall sandwiches "Norville". When Hanna-Barbera was…
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How TV characters afford their impossible penthouses
Television characters are rarely seen doing actual hard labor, yet they manage to financially support extravagant lifestyles. They exist in incredibly vague,…
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Reality dating contestants cook their own daily meals
Nothing screams romance like chopping raw onions in a crowded mansion kitchen. While viewers assume these singles enjoy endless luxury, participants are…
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Why movie scripts follow a formula
If you think cinematic pacing is pure magical inspiration, prepare to be entirely disappointed by basic math. The vast majority of modern scripts strictly…
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Haiku poetry forced emotional brevity
Because rambling about your feelings is exhausting. By strict adherence to a rigid syllable count, Japanese poets forced themselves to capture entire seasons…
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Burlesque began by mocking elite opera
Long before it became synonymous with tassels and stripteases, burlesque was an intellectual exercise in mockery. The genre began as theatrical parodies that…
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Brass instruments require a physical lip buzz to function
For all their gleaming metal glory, the actual sound source of a trumpet is just someone blowing a specialized raspberry. The intricate tubing simply…
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Paul Rudd has used the same prank for 20 years
True comedic commitment is dragging out a joke for over twenty years without ever apologizing. Whenever Rudd goes on Conan O'Brien's talk show to promote a…
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Contestants wait for a light to buzz in
Nobody is actually psychic. All those lightning-fast answers are just the result of off-camera light bulbs flashing to signal that the host's microphone is…
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Stage thunder was once just a shaking metal sheet
Summoning the wrath of the heavens is shockingly low-budget. Long before digital audio, stage crews created ominous thunderstorms by hoisting a massive,…
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Disney built a physics engine just for snow
You can't just draw white dots and call it a blizzard anymore. To capture the precise, agonizingly specific way snow clumps, crunches, and breaks apart under…
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