Author: Kevin Nye

As someone who grew up in the Midwest, Hawaii used to hold a certain amount of mystique. As an adult who has visited the state, it’s hard to wrap your head around how strange it is that Hawaii is part of the same country as the one I grew up in. It’s not even an overseas territory like Guam, which Hawaii is far more similar to than say, I don’t know, Massachusetts. I knew Hawaii became a state recently, and I knew that the bombing of Pearl Harbor was the flashpoint of the Pacific theater of World War II, and…

We have previously written about the haphazard and wildly unsuccessful expansion efforts the Canadian Football League put in place to reach US audiences in the 1990s. The short version is that they tried to put teams in non-NFL markets and play most of their games before the NFL season began to avoid competition. What ended up happening is that a handful of teams lost between $1 and $10 million each over the course of about three years. Teams kept folding and moving and trying again elsewhere. But no team had a more absurd journey than the Las Vegas Posse. After…

Henry Ford’s legacy is enormous. With the Ford Motor Company still hugely relevant today, it’s hard to overstate how influential he was in the early 1900s. Here in the 21st century, it would be easy to assume that Ford was a terrible person based solely on his incomprehensible wealth, but he was one of the first big proponents of workers’ rights and he was responsible for the workweek dropping from six days to five (and he famously did NOT reduce workers’ wages). Of course, he was also openly antisemitic, so he’s not exactly a beacon of grace. But while his…

Humans have an inherent desire to find patterns. In a large-scale sense, scientists as renowned as Neil deGrasse Tyson believe that “humans’ pattern recognition skills determined natural selection.” The ability to recognize patterns is believed to stem from an area of the brain called the neocortex. Without diving too deep into the details, we seem to crave patterns to the point that we look for them where there is nothing. This is the reason we see faces in inanimate objects or believe that we can develop systems that will allow us to consistently win while gambling. With that in mind,…

People are complicated. While in our hearts we know that it’s true, it can be a lot of fun to find people who really ride the line when it comes to defining a legacy. One of the more interesting legacies I’ve seen recently is that of Madalyn Murray O’Hair. In the early days, Madalyn was a relatively unremarkable woman living in Ohio. She was born in 1919. She got married in 1941 but separated from her husband when they both enlisted in the military during WWII. During her deployment she met and married a man named William Murray, Jr, who…

The audience reach of an NFL game is staggering in the United States. This is particularly crazy when the postseason comes around: More Americans watched this year’s Super Bowl than voted in November’s non-presidential elections. Fully one-third of Americans watch the Super Bowl. It’s borderline obscene how popular the NFL is in America. So why don’t other football leagues work? You’d think with such a huge appetite for the sport, rival leagues would catch a toehold, but somehow the last 40 years of football in America have been littered with failure after failure. A taste of those failures: The Canadian…

Blimps, zeppelins, dirigibles, airships. While there are slight differences in what might define these things, most people have a pretty good idea of what they look like and what they do. They’re giant pill-shaped balloons that fly, with some moderate level of control, typically over sporting events and provide us with overhead views. But blimps didn’t just arrive at your friendly neighborhood college football game fully formed; it was quite a journey to become what they are today. The first thing we might (erroneously) call a blimp was designed and built in Germany around 1900 by a man named Count…

Before we even get into the Chen Tao UFO cult, as it is affectionately known, I would like to express my concerns about upstate New York. This writer has driven through the area a few times and has done getaways into the Adirondacks; upstate New York is beautiful. But for some reason the area has an incredibly robust history of cults. Generally speaking, cults revolve around a small group of leaders finding ways to have sex with as many people as they possibly can. For example, you have the Oneida cult (which was in Oneida, NY) and the NXIVM cult…

Walking is a near-essential part of the human experience. It’s our primary mode of transport, obviously, but it’s also a hugely important part of our well-being. You can see this in articles about how doctors are prescribing time in nature to reduce stress and improve general health. While too much of a good thing can turn bad, walking rarely falls into that category. But what if all you did was walk? That’s what the Leatherman did. Who Was the Leatherman? There was a vagabond who lived in New England in the mid-1800s known colloquially as the Leatherman. He hand-stitched himself a…

Military conflicts take a lot of forms. If we look at the United States’ military history, we see incidents like Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the Lusitania, or the insistence on ownership of other humans as the impetus for taking up arms. But not all wars are so cut and dry, and sometimes shots are never fired despite sky-high military tensions, much like the famous Cold War. But among wars with “War” in their name, there is perhaps no sillier conflict in US history than the Pig War. Seriously? What Was the Pig War? Most people have never heard of…