Amusing Planet

In the autumn of 1944, as World War II raged across Europe, a moment of extraordinary humanity occurred in the Dutch village of Goirle. On ...

In the northern reaches of Minnesota, within the sprawling Chippewa National Forest, lies a rare remnant of America’s ecological past—a 144 ...

Humans have been making music for thousands of years, as evidenced by fragments of ancient instruments unearthed by archaeologists, such as ...

In the years leading up to the First World War, Britain’s Royal Navy faced an existential challenge. Germany’s naval expansion, and especial...

The Ambrose Channel pilot cable was an early 20th-century navigational aid installed on the seabed of New York Harbor’s Ambrose Channel, the...

In the autumn of 1952, a small black rubber dinghy drifted out of the Canaries and into the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean. Its lone occupa...

On a crisp October morning in 1906, a man in an immaculate Prussian captain’s uniform marched into the Berlin suburb of Köpenick and coolly ...

In the early decades of the twentieth century, as radium fever gripped scientists and entrepreneurs alike, one Philadelphia businessman join...

In 1667, in a small Parisian chamber lit by oil lamps and crowded with curious observers, a young physician named Jean-Baptiste Denys carrie...

In California’s Imperial Valley—an expanse of desert where geothermal energy, agriculture, and quiet rural towns coexist—lies one of the mos...