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Oct 15, 2026

The Cholesterol in Your Food Was Never the Problem. It Took the Guidelines 47 Years to Admit It. The Cholesterol in Your Blood Is a Completely Different Story.

Three cholesterol stories: the egg advice that was withdrawn after 47 years, the "good cholesterol" that turned out not to be a lever, and the one finding that survives every test thrown at it.

Oct 13, 2026

A Missing Comma Cost a Dairy Five Million Dollars. America Banned Sliced Bread for Seven Weeks. And Two More Times the Rules Came Apart.

Four stories about rules written by people who were sure they had thought it through — a punctuation mark that rewrote an overtime law, a wartime ban nobody could justify, a speeding conviction at eight miles an hour, and a brewery that turned pub arguments into the best-selling copyrighted book in history.

Oct 9, 2026

The Fax Machine Is Older Than the Telephone. The Black Box Is Orange. And Nintendo Was Fourteen Years Old Before Anyone Had Flown a Plane.

Three things that arrived in the wrong order, or under the wrong name. Our sense of when technology happened is built almost entirely from when we personally first saw it — and that instinct is wrong by decades.

Oct 6, 2026

Wine Judges Scored the Same Wine 91, 87 and 95 — From the Same Bottle, in the Same Flight.

They were students, not sommeliers. Some of them did notice. And the tasting experiment was never peer-reviewed — but the real evidence against wine judging is worse.

Oct 2, 2026

Ten Thousand Steps Was an Advert. Stockholm Syndrome Was a Smear. Three More Things You Repeat That Nobody Ever Checked.

Five things everybody knows, each of which turns out to have been invented by somebody with a motive: a clockmaker, a police adviser, a showman, a newspaper industry, and a training seminar.

Sep 29, 2026

Nobody Got Sicker on Those Mornings. A Committee Lowered a Number, and Millions Became Patients Overnight — and the Line for Diabetes, Blood Pressure and Cholesterol Has Almost Only Ever Moved One Way.

The cutoffs that decide whether you have diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol feel like biology. They're votes taken by expert panels — they keep dropping, and each drop hands an already-licensed drug a bigger market.

Sep 25, 2026

Intuition Is Real, but It's Just Fast Recognition — “Trust Your Intuition” Failed the Lab, and the One Sex Gap That Survives Runs Toward Men, Not Women

Two psychologists who spent their careers disagreeing about intuition sat down to settle it — and agreed on exactly when yours can be trusted. The answer is uncomfortable.

Sep 22, 2026

The Spanish Flu Wasn't Spanish. The Marshmallow Test Measures Your Parents' Income. And Three More Things You're Sure About That Aren't True.

Five things almost everyone believes — a food scare, a famous experiment, a famous murder, a wine myth and a pandemic's name — that fall apart the moment anyone checks.

Sep 17, 2026

Men Get Sentences 63% Longer Than Women for Comparable Crimes. The Gap Is Six Times Larger Than the Racial Disparity Everyone Argues About. Most of It Is Created Before a Judge Sees the Case.

One of the largest measured disparities in criminal justice is also one of the least discussed. Part of it is unconscious bias, part of it is written into official sentencing guidance, and almost none of it happens in the courtroom.

Sep 15, 2026

Lindsay Clancy Killed Her Three Children While in Postpartum Psychosis. The Jury Deadlocked — Because America Gives Them Only Two Boxes, Murderer or Innocent, and the Rest of the World Has a Third.

She killed her three children and tried to end her own life while, her defence argued, in the grip of severe postpartum psychosis. Her jury still deadlocked — and the reason lies in American law, not the facts of her case.

Sep 10, 2026

Australia Sent Machine Guns to Fight Birds and Lost. That One Is True. The Other Four Things in This Issue Are Not.

Four things everybody knows that turn out to be wrong, and one genuine event so ridiculous that most people assume it is a joke. Telling them apart is harder than it sounds.

Sep 3, 2026

Acupuncture Beat Standard Medical Care in a 1,162-Patient Trial. So Did Sticking the Needles in the Wrong Places. Both Results Are Real.

The best trials show acupuncture genuinely outperforms doing nothing, and even beat conventional care for chronic back pain. They also show that the meridian map it is sold with does none of the work.

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