The march of progress has not been kind to comedy. The banana peel gag? Ruined when we developed a modern waste-management system. Seltzer in the face? Hard to accomplish with a can of La Croix. Crossed letters, missed phone calls, mixed-up messages left on answering machines? Driven...
On two separate occasions in August 1943, legendary military commander George S. Patton walked into a field hospital in Italy and slapped a “shell-shocked” private. Today, we’d diagnose the soldiers as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but to Patton they were mere cowards. The incidents dogged Patton...
Like the cliché ending of a sports movie, the clock ticked down, one second at a time, until it read zero — a close 27–20 game between the Houston Texans and Kansas City Chiefs now complete. The winning team, the Chiefs, ran onto the field in jubilation. I, however,...
In traditional Chinese culture, life doesn’t necessarily end after you die. You simply move onto an afterlife that’s best experienced with the same creature comforts and cash it takes to make your way through the mortal plane. (The Chinese also believe that money can be used to...
In a low gray building on the side of a dusty road in Sun Valley, CA, human bodies are being sliced up, bloodied, and otherwise mutilated in unspeakable ways. It’s high season for horror, and Dapper Cadaver, a “death-related prop house and prop fabrication shop” is churning...
Aaron Yoder, 31, is the head track-and-field and cross-country coach at Bethany College in Kansas. He’s also one of the world’s greatest backward runners, which is exactly what it sounds like (jogging, sprinting or racing backward instead of forward). I do my workout very early in the...
It wasn’t that long ago that women were considered the legal property of men. Ownership of a woman was transferred from her father to husband upon marriage, and signified by her swapping out her father’s last name for her husband’s. Treating women as literal chattel seems unthinkable...
Feel like you haven’t gotten a good handshake in years? It’s not you. Kids today can’t grip for shit. A study out of Winston-Salem State University found that men in their early 20s in 1985 could crush, on average, 121 pounds with their right hand, and 105...
The image of the man who spends his nights on the internet is that of a prowler — a dude whose sole purpose is to slide into DMs. Dr. Nancy Kalish offers another archetype of the modern male trolling social media — that of the guy looking to track down his...
The most popular post in the history of the r/happycryingdads subreddit is a video of man learning he’s going to be a grandfather. The man, who has a mustache and wears a Chicago Cubs bullpen jacket, opens a box to find a pacifier. Tied to the pacifier...
It’s not a secret that for the last several years, vinyl record sales have been trending upward — with sales in 2016 reaching their highest point since 1988. Estimates vary a bit, but at bare minimum, the number of records manufactured annually is well into eight figures. Regardless of...
Ten miles south of Vegas, along an otherwise uneventful stretch of freeway, sits a colorful pile of neon rocks. While they could be mistaken for a desert mirage—or an acid flashback—they’re actually an art installation. The day-glow Stonehenge, named “Seven Magic Mountains,” is the brainchild of artist...