Amusing Planet

In the rugged hills of north western Spain, amid green forests of chestnut and oak, rises an otherworldly landscape of jagged red cliffs, ho...

Many violent riots have begun over matters that seem almost absurd. In 1325, the rival cities of Modena and Bologna went to war over a woode...

Among the countless local celebrations held across Japan each year, one of the most unusual is the Enrei Onodachi Memorial Festival, often d...

In the early 19th century, England produced an animal so enormous that it became a national curiosity. Named the Craven Heifer, this extraor...

Before the modern period, in Japan, certain colours were strictly regulated by law and custom, and wearing them without permission could be ...

On the evening of 17 September 1908, a young American officer named Thomas Selfridge climbed into a fragile wooden aircraft at Fort Myer, Vi...

In 480 BC, Xerxes the Great, the fourth king of the Achaemenid Empire, launched the largest invasion the Greek world had yet faced. Xerxes’s...

In the 3rd century BCE, at the height of the Hellenistic age’s appetite for spectacle and scale, a ship was built so vast that even ancient ...

In the early 19th century, the idea of exporting ice to the tropics sounded like a joke. Ice was heavy, fragile, and melted. Yet one Boston ...

Few writers have multiplied themselves as radically, or as deliberately, as Fernando Pessoa. The Portuguese poet did not merely use pen name...