In 1932, a 22-year-old John W. Campbell — later the Astounding editor who shaped midcentury science fiction, and, as has been well documented, an open fascist — published "The Last… Read the rest of the article: In 1932, John W. Campbell imagined machines outliving humanity

A worn copy of a 1912 pulp magazine, graded just 2.0, sold for $58,560 this month because Tarzan is on the cover. All-Story No. 94, from October 1912, contains "the… Read the rest of the article: The first Tarzan pulp sold for $58,560 at a record-setting auction

Kryptos is a sculpture by artist Jim Sanborn on the grounds of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Dedicated on November 3, 1990, it carries four encrypted messages. "Of these four… Read the rest of the article: A sculpture at CIA headquarters has kept a coded message secret for 35 years

Grant Sanderson's new 3Blue1Brown video starts from a 1940s question — how far can you compress text? — and arrives at why it matters for AI. The bridge is from… Read the rest of the article: How Claude Shannon used his wife as a language model in 1950

Choi Eun-hee was one of South Korea's biggest film stars of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1978 she traveled to Hong Kong to meet a supposed businessman about a new… Read the rest of the article: Kim Jong-il had a South Korean actress kidnapped to make him movies

The Utsuro-bune ("hollow boat") was an object that "allegedly washed ashore in 1803 in Hitachi province on the eastern coast of Japan." According to the legend, "a young woman aged… Read the rest of the article: In 1803 a woman in a strange round vessel washed ashore in Japan

Tarrare was an 18th-century French showman and soldier who could eat almost without limit and was "constantly hungry." As a performer, he "swallowed corks, stones, live animals, and a whole… Read the rest of the article: The spy who ate live animals, documents, and possibly a toddler

On September 15, 1896, the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad crashed two unmanned locomotives into each other at speed as a public spectacle. The Crash at Crush was the idea of passenger agent… Read the rest of the article: In 1896 a railroad crashed two trains head-on for fun and killed two spectators

In parts of Uttar Pradesh, India, one way to seize a relative's land is to bribe an official to declare them dead. The Uttar Pradesh Association of Dead People exists… Read the rest of the article: Lal Bihari was legally dead for 18 years and fought to undo it

Kevin Kelly wrote Out of Control in 1994, a sprawling study of emergence, hive minds, and bottom-up systems that arrived before the web and got mostly ignored in the US.… Read the rest of the article: Kevin Kelly rereads his big weird book from 1994 and mostly stands by it

After we posted about Pawmometer, the free site that reads live weather to flag pavement hot enough to burn a dog's paws, reader Chris Fiegel wrote in to say he'd… Read the rest of the article: A reader built a breed-aware app for hot-pavement dog safety

Ethan Mollick got early access to Anthropic's new Fable model and came away unsettled — not by what it couldn't do, but by how little he had to. He gave… Read the rest of the article: Working with Anthropic's new model feels like being a patron, not a wizard

Allen Ginsberg would have turned 100 this month, and his own voice reading "Howl" is coming back to vinyl. Craft Recordings is reissuing Howl and Other Poems — the spoken-word… Read the rest of the article: Ginsberg's 1959 Howl album returns for his 100th birthday

English Heritage is hiring a Head of Stonehenge. The salary starts at £64,189, the listing throws in 25 days' holiday and "free access to all English Heritage sites for you… Read the rest of the article: You can apply to be the Head of Stonehenge

The burner phone could soon be a thing of the past in the US. The FCC has proposed forcing every telecom to collect and store a "government issued identification number"… Read the rest of the article: The FCC wants to make burner phones illegal

Anthropic released its most capable model yet today, and it ships with a downgrade switch pointed at the user. Claude Fable 5 is "state-of-the-art on nearly all tested benchmarks," but… Read the rest of the article: Anthropic's most powerful model comes with a kill switch aimed at you

More than 700 medieval tunnels called Erdstall honeycomb the ground in Bavaria, with hundreds more across Austria and central Europe. They are tiny — about 1 to 1.4 meters high… Read the rest of the article: Hundreds of tiny medieval tunnels no one can explain

On February 4, 1963, the SS Marine Sulphur Queen sent a routine position report from the Gulf of Mexico, about 200 miles west of the Florida Keys, and was never… Read the rest of the article: A tanker of molten sulphur vanished with 39 crew in 1963

Jehan Azad couldn't stop believing the Navy's "tic tac" UFO sighting was real, and it was wrecking his peace of mind. So he tried to get talked out of it… Read the rest of the article: He hired the world's best debunker to talk him out of UFOs, and it backfired

A self-described technologist describes on the Haven blog how he gives his kids the parts of technology he loved growing up, while keeping the surveillance-economy parts out of the house.… Read the rest of the article: A landline, a CD boom box, and a Pi-Hole: one dad's tech setup for kids