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Featured lorelets.
Three new ones every day, picked from what's worth knowing about. Each is the whole story, cited claim by claim, with a narrator ready to read it to you.
Today · Film & TV
Why Nick Jr. Aired the Same Blue's Clues Episode All Week
A preschool show about a cartoon dog and her pawprints became a quiet experiment in how children actually learn from television — and the data said:…
Today · Crime
Liquid Gold: The Black Market for Used Cooking Oil
Green energy policy turned restaurant fryer grease into a commodity worth stealing, and a quiet corner of American crime grew up around it.
Today · Business
The Terminal: How a Firing Built Wall Street's Addiction
Michael Bloomberg got pushed out of Salomon Brothers with a check for about $10 million. He turned it into a locked-box machine that trading floors s…
Sep 30 · Film & TV
The Pixar Lunch That Conceived Four Animated Classics
In the summer of 1994, four Pixar staffers went to a diner while Toy Story was still finishing up and, over lunch, sketched the outlines of A Bug's L…
Sep 30 · Art & Design
Lost in Plain Sight: The Rediscovery of Church's The Icebergs
A monumental Arctic painting by America's most famous landscape artist spent decades hanging unrecognized in an English boys' home before selling for…
Sep 30 · Sports
The Night Football First Flickered Onto TV Screens
On a September afternoon in 1939, two clunky cameras on Randall's Island quietly launched American sports television, and almost nobody watching the…
Sep 29 · Crime
The Man Who Flooded Missouri to Ditch His Wife
In 1993, a levee near Quincy gave way and drowned 15,000 acres of farmland. Prosecutors said James Scott broke it so his wife couldn't come home from…
Sep 29 · History
The Two Planes That Landed as One
Over a paddock in New South Wales, a 22-year-old trainee pilot flew a wrecked, welded-together pair of bombers to a landing nobody thought possible.
Sep 29 · Film & TV
The Night Disney Showed Critics an Unfinished Cartoon
In September 1991, Disney took a half-finished Beauty and the Beast to the New York Film Festival, pencil tests and all, betting that hardened cineph…