Which U.S. presidents never went to college? From Lincoln to Truman, meet the least educated presidents and the remarkable paths that took them
Every time you try to picture what daily American life looked like sixty or seventy years ago, it’s easy to land on the rose-tinted version: backyard barbecues, drive-in movies, families piled into station wagons headed for the lake. What that picture tends to leave out is the part where the doctor lit a cigarette in...
Every year, millions of people stream past the gilded gates of Buckingham Palace, crane their necks at the famous balcony, and take roughly the same photograph. They see the same polished stone façade, the same guards in bearskin hats, the same crowds pressing against the railings. Almost none of them walk away knowing that the...
Most of us grow up absorbing the beliefs of our faith communities without ever questioning where those ideas came from. They’re in the air at Sunday school, woven into sermons, sung in hymns. If enough people repeat them with enough conviction, they start to feel ancient and authoritative, and eventually, they feel biblical. The trouble...
Look, you probably think of yourself as a reasonably normal person. You drink too much coffee, doomscroll before bed, get a little too invested in reality TV, and maybe cry at the occasional commercial. Perfectly fine. Totally rational. Nothing to see here. But if you had the misfortune of being alive in Victorian England or...
Every state in this country carries at least one story so dark, so strange, or so stubbornly persistent that it has outlasted the people who first told it. Some are rooted in Indigenous traditions thousands of years old. Others grew from genuine historical tragedies that local communities couldn’t quite process and couldn’t quite forget. A...
Tsunamis don’t look the way we picture them. Most people, if they imagined one coming, would picture a towering wall of dark water. The reality is stranger and, in some ways, more terrifying: a relentless surge that doesn’t stop, that keeps pushing inland for minutes at a time, carrying everything in its path. By the...
King Charles III has been on the throne for less than three years, which raises a direct question: what would happen to Camilla if he dies first? The public is still adjusting to a King after seven decades of a Queen, and his cancer diagnosis in 2024 made the line of succession a sudden, practical...
Most people could name a handful of things the U.S. president can do without breaking a sweat. Sign bills into law. Command the military. Pardon federal criminals. Grant or withhold things by executive order with a stroke of a pen. The office radiates authority in a way that makes it easy to assume the person...
Pull out a box from under anyone’s bed in America right now, and you’ll probably find at least one thing from the 70s or 80s that they absolutely cannot bring themselves to throw away. Not because they’ve forgotten it’s there. Because they’ve chosen, repeatedly, to keep it. The worn-out t-shirt that hasn’t been washed since...
The history of slavery in America is one of the most documented, studied, and also most misunderstood subjects in the American story. Most of us absorbed some version of it in school, maybe reinforced it through films, and rarely questioned what we thought we knew. But the actual numbers, the raw census tallies from 1860...
There are three things about America that pretty much everyone who’s visited from abroad notices immediately: the portions are enormous, the flags are everywhere, and the price of a hospital visit will make you want to lie down on a free park bench and reconsider your life choices. But those are the obvious ones, the...
