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Don’t let the relatively small regional audiences and occasionally mundane stories get you fooled, local news is a high-pressure media arena, and in many ways the lack of major funding forces reporters to go beyond their normal comfort zones more often. Two recent listicles explored the various failures of these overworked and underpaid professionals, mental_floss [...]

During a summer bike trip down the West coast of North America some years ago, we passed a broken down clown car and couldn’t help but offer assistance to the unfortunate performers in peril. In true clown transportation tradition, we managed to fit eight clowns on our bike in various precarious ways, which we’re pretty [...]

Today is Leif Ericson Day, an occasion to celebrate the achievements of that valiant Norse explorer (approx 970-1020), most notably being the first European to set foot on the North American continent, likely somewhere near the tip of what is now Newfoundland. Given his broad region of influence–Iceland, Norway, Greenland, North America–you might find celebrations [...]

Recently, as part of a series on the American dental industry, Slate looked at some of the most famous dentist characters throughout movie history. Evidently, Marathon Man and Little Shop of Horrors had to be included in the ensuing listicle of 11 Movie Dentists, but we were surprised to see some of our favorite oral [...]

180 years ago today, Scotland Yard opened for spy business in London. Technically called the Metropolitan Police Service, it’s essentially the headquarters for the police force that oversees Greater London (as opposed to inner city London, whose surveillance falls to the City of London Police). Of course, the force is now housed at New Scotland [...]

Sending kids to stand in the corner to reprimand naughty behavior seems, well, slightly arcane as far as ways of flexing parental authority go. Why not make them wear dunce caps too while we’re at it? A slightly more humane–though infinitely more creepy and still on balance foolish–variation of the standing in the corner punishment [...]

Today marks the 40th anniversary of Nerf, invented by intrepid toy creator Reyn Guyer. In lieu of an actual Nerf battle (although it’s tempting), we’ve rounded up some of our favorite ads by the foam gun manufacturers. They weren’t always in the arms business, though, as you’ll see with the first couple entries in our [...]

Over the weekend a massive 11-hour riot broke out at a jail in Chino, just outside Los Angeles. Between Saturday night and Sunday morning some 250 prisoners were injured, with over fifty ending up hospitalized. Though nobody was killed, and no prison employees were injured, the violence between black and Latino gangs did some pretty [...]

Here at Listicles we spend so long in the writing of lists that whenever we come across snazzy lists within images (which, if you’ve been following, is fairly often), we react with a strange mixture of admiration and defensiveness. After all, if these illustrators and designers can make lists without us, the writers, then what [...]

Sure, we could have posted this at the beginning of the long weekend as a preventive warning to would-be pyros, but then we would be hurting the chances of future fireworks disaster videos emerging. If you still have enough digits to click a mouse, or enough eyes to watch YouTube videos, we suggest taking a [...]