Category Articles

My articles for Mental Floss this month were about birds! Check it out: 10 Weird and Wonderful Bird Nests Annnnnnd: 9 Bizarre Bird Mating Rituals

Writer’s Digest posted an article I wrote that originally appeared in the magazine: 5 Writing Lessons Inspired by Famous Writers. A sample: I was 16 when I visited the cabin where Mark Twain wrote “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras…

I have a new article with Mental Floss: 10 Surprising Facts About Archie Comics. Remember that time Archie was a superhero called Captain Pureheart? Remember the Archie Andrews radio show? Remember that time Archie was used to piss off The…

I have a new article up at Mental Floss called 9 Controversial Experiments In Rewilding. Excerpt: Strange as it is to imagine, at one point lions roamed Europe, horses galloped over Spain, and jaguars prowled parts of the United States.…

[Courtesy] My latest article at Mental Floss is pretty cool. The Smithsonian has been scanning artifacts and putting 3D models online that you can print out on your printer. Print out a Wooly Mammoth skeleton or Abraham Lincoln’s face! Read…

My newest article in Mental Floss is 39 Dishes from the First Christmas Menu, Published in 1660. If the thought of planning Christmas dinner makes you nervous, be glad you weren’t born in the Renaissance. The earliest known published Christmas…

My newest article on Mental Floss is about Santa Claus. It turns out that a church in Bari, Italy has St. Nicholas’s remains and they claim that his bones are releasing a sweet smelling liquid that they call manna. Every…

Check out my newest for Mental Floss: 5 Obscure Looney Tunes Cartoons. That’s right, weird, cool, visually interesting cartoons for your Thanksgiving enjoyment. Watch them now before Warner Brothers takes them down!

Wow, is all I can say to this passage about Robert Louis Stevenson Writing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Robert Louis Stevenson [churned] out Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in six days while under the pall of tuberculosis and the…

I have a new article in Mental Floss: 10 Fascinating Facts About Ravens. The raven is an amazing bird. It’s incredibly smart, it plays with other animals, and it can talk. I was so impressed while researching this article, I…

I have a new article up on Mental Floss called 11 Nintendo Games Based on Classic Works of Literature. Turns out there were Nintendo games based on all kinds of books, from Tom Sawyer to Frankenstein to Peter Pan. And…

I have a new article up in Mental Floss: 10 Strange Facts About Hot Air Balloons. Did you know that Abraham Lincoln formed a Balloon Corps during the Civil War? And that the first passengers in a hot air balloon…