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) silent, and behind the scenes we’ll be taking a brief break from our usual researching, writing, editing, illustrating, narrating, sound designing, coding, […]

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 invite you to bookmark our curated links page, or follow us a number of other ways. Rather than linger any longer on this tedious […]

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 articles sporting even saltier vocabularies (settle down, Colonel Sanders!). Countless school teachers have admonished us for our casual profanity, the […]

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 horses and feathers: For the past few years, we at Damn Interesting have been hearing from scores of long-time fans who were under the […]

Fifteen years ago today, Damn Interesting materialized on this series of intercontinental information tubes. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move (with apologies to Douglas Adams). To observe this controversial conception, we are sowing further controversy: Our short-form writings, formerly known as “nuggets”, will […]

Five years ago, we at Damn Interesting published an original long-form article titled The Zero-Armed Bandit. It describes how a large, menacing device appeared mysteriously one morning in a popular Lake Tahoe casino in 1980, along with a note claiming that the thing was a bomb. But it didn’t look like any bomb anyone had […]

Beards have been banned in a number of military forces in history, from Qing Dynasty China to the modern-day Indian Army (apart from Sikhs). However certain countries allow soldiers to wear beards as long as they receive authorization from a commanding officer. In the UK’s Royal Navy, for instance, the traditional formula has been to […]

In January of 1963, husband and wife George and Charlotte Blonsky submitted a patent application for a revolutionary invention. George, a mining engineer, was not a father himself, but he was fond of children, and he evidently wished to expedite the propagation of the human species. To that end, the Blonskys proposed their “Apparatus for […]

In 1977, in response to a fortuitous alignment of the outer planets of our solar system, NASA launched space probes Voyager 1 and 2 to tour the outer planets and transmit photographs back to Earth. In that capacity the Voyagers were spectacularly successful, sending tens of thousands of images of planets and moons back to […]

Transcript of audio: Hello listeners, Alan Bellows here, founder of Damn Interesting. This month, September 2015, we at Damn Interesting are celebrating our 10th birthday. Because we modern humans use a base ten numbering system, ten and multiples of ten naturally feel like big milestones. But base ten is actually a pretty poor base for […]