Latest Stories
Most recently published stories in FYI.
Hatshepsut: Egypt's Greatest Pharaoh
In Libya, a man named Herodotus recorded the tales of tribes dotting the desert. Among the Bedouin campfires drinking spicy mint tea, he learned their stories and customs. After desert winds blew into every fold of his garments and his inkpot grew thick with sand, he ventured into the land of the ancient river. This river was a wide ribbon of water, cutting through the desert. The language was like a distant song he dreamed but could not speak. Herodotus was easily distracted. A long journey, the desert, and determination can do that to a man.
By Nikole Lynn5 years ago in FYI
The 'Secrets' of Mount Rushmore
1. George Washington has a piece of metal longer than your arm stuck in his eyeball. A drill bit got stuck there during the carving. No one knows why the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, decided to leave it there. It is likely the sculptor was worried the eye would crumble if he tried to hard to pull it out.
By Reed Clark5 years ago in FYI
Globular star clusters
Globular clusters are spherical clusters of stars that typically contain a few hundreds of thousands of stars, or even as many as a million. They are not galaxies, but are associated with galaxies in that they orbit around the galactic plane in a spherical halo.
By John Welford5 years ago in FYI
The myth of Atalanta
Mortal women (i.e. not goddesses) do not get a particularly good press in Greek mythology. They tend either to be driven to murder as revenge for wrongs done to them, e.g. Clytaemnestra and Medea, or seducers who bring death and destruction in their wake, most notably Helen but others include Phaedra and Astydameia.
By John Welford5 years ago in FYI
Anglo-Saxon Architecture
Modern knowledge of Anglo-Saxon architecture is limited by a number of factors. One is that many of their buildings, particularly domestic dwellings, were wooden, and so have not survived. Another is that people of later ages built over the top of earlier foundations, thus obliterating or confusing the evidence of what was there before.
By John Welford5 years ago in FYI
That One Time That the Dutch People Ate Their Prime Minister
AtAtthe end of the evening on the 20th of August 1672, the brothers De Witt were brutally murdered and even eaten by the Dutch people. This double murder is one of the most memorable murders in Dutch history.
By Bryan Dijkhuizen5 years ago in FYI
How To Understand Steve Jobs By Reading Less
A legend has a whole lot of history behind its success and this is no special. Steve Jobs, one of the co-founders of Apple is one legend we can never forget. A single-minded perfectionist, Jobs was a visionary who wanted to change the world through technology. In the book Steve Jobs, you'll discover that while Jobs' perfectionism and intensity pushed him to achieve great things, those same traits were the cause of friction and conflict.
By Manoj Upadhyay5 years ago in FYI
I Am Obsessed with Reading Dead People's Diaries
I've been interested in diaries as a literary genre for almost as long as I can remember. Fake ones (the Dear America series of children's books; Catherine, Called Birdy; Don't You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey), real ones (Anne Frank, Samuel Pepys, Sylvia Plath, Anne Lister, Virginia Woolf), blogs, vlogs, and more! I want the juicy, mundane details of the everyday lives of strangers. Unpublished private diaries particularly appeal to me because of their lack of self-consciousness. These writers aren't trying to impress any audience at all, which sometimes makes for extremely boring minutia (which is interesting in its own way) and other times reveals unconventional and charming sincerity you won't find in an Instagram post. The diaries as physical objects are also fascinating. Each person's handwriting takes me a few pages to get used to before I can consistently read it. Some, I have never fully cracked. Most of them are pre-dated diaries for a particular year, so the writers only had a specific amount of space to write in for each day. I hesitate to even share this niche hobby for fear that new interest will make for more competitive bidding and the prices will go up. Maybe I need to make it a little harder to indulge my addiction though. Here's a rundown of some of the most interesting and most boring diaries I've read over the last 6 months.
By Chuck Hoff5 years ago in FYI
