Blake Stilwell is a traveler and writer with degrees in design, television & film, journalism, public relations, international relations, and business administration. He is a former US Air Force combat photographer with experience covering politics, entertainment, development, nonprofit, military, and government. His work can be found at We Are The Mighty, Business Insider, Fox News, ABC News, NBC, HBO, and the White House.
As Americans watched the fighting of World War I unfold overseas, a sensational story out of New Jersey temporarily ripped the war from the headlines. An enormous shark of unknown origin had finally been caught off the coast of New Jersey. The ...
An old wives’ tale says that sprinkling coffee grounds around your homes and plants will help keep the ants away. Not only is that wrong, but it also might even attract some ants who are looking to build their own kind of coffee farms. While ...
Ethiopia lies in East Africa, where the topography features everything from arid desert lowlands to fertile subtropical highlands. It’s also the place where the first humans emerged, and — perhaps more importantly — where coffee was born. Like ...
Coffee is both inspirational and aspirational. For better or for worse, it has been inspiring and motivating humans in just about every endeavor and institution since the 1500s. Whether you want to be part of the coffeehouse boom or you’re just in ...
When coffee finally made its way into the hearts and minds of Europeans, European leaders did everything they could to prove that it was somehow bad for you. In their minds, coffee was the drink of Muslims and would upend their societies and replace ...
Life in America is getting more and more expensive by the day. Photos of gas prices in California are stoking fears of inflation across the country. There’s reason for concern, as inflation is at the highest rate seen since 1982. But if you think ...
Between 1974 and 1978, TV viewers tuned in by the millions to watch Angie Dickinson go undercover and take down rings of drug pushers, jewel thieves, and gangsters. Police Woman wasn’t the first show centered around a female cop, but it was arguably ...
It’s been almost 36 years since the worst man-made disaster in history unfolded at the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine, and the site has again become a source of collective anxiety as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has ...
How do you take your coffee? Cream? Sugar? It’s the signature question of gracious hosts, one-night stands, and cafe waitresses. It doesn’t matter whether you like cream, sugar, or both; we all like our coffee the way we like it. For those of us who ...
When Chris Trokey was born in 1986, he weighed just 3.2 pounds. Doctors at his Southern California hospital gave him a 50-50 chance of long-term survival. For one of those doctors, that just wasn’t good enough. The pediatrician who worked through the ...
Communism sucks no matter where it’s implemented, but few places suffered harder under communism than Albania. The centrally controlled People's Socialist Republic of Albania took a once-proud people and turned their country into a paranoid, ...
The friars of St. Francis of Assisi were just not as pious as they could have been in 1525 in the eyes of Matteo Bassi. Bassi was a Franciscan who felt the friars could live with more poverty and more chastity, so he set out to found a new order, one ...
These days, film and television viewers are used to seeing onscreen cops being close friends with their partners. With movies and television shows like Bad Boys, Miami Vice, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the buddy-cop story is its own genre. Before ...
In the early 1970s, hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying every year due to the lack of paramedic services. Then a television show about paramedics came to the country’s rescue. For decades, the powerful medium we used to call “the boob ...
For many coffee enthusiasts, few things in life are better than popping open a bag of good coffee and taking a big whiff of the beans. The smell of coffee makes them feel like they can conquer the day and anything it brings. It turns out that ...
Before it was fully embraced by European Christians in the 17th century, coffee had a long and contentious history in the minds of Christians, who regarded it as the black bean of the Islamic world. While sipping cortados, espressos, and café au ...
Anyone who’s ever been to New Orleans has likely come across one of the signature (nonalcoholic) drinks of Louisiana: A hot cup of coffee mixed with chicory, likely served as a cafe au lait, and probably with a beignet. These sweet concoctions are ...
Long before Chris Kyle penned “American Sniper,” Carlos Hathcock was already a legend. He taught himself to shoot as a boy, just like Alvin York and Audie Murphy before him. He had dreamed of being a U.S. Marine his whole life and enlisted in 1959 ...
There are a lot of people who are bad at their jobs, but few are so bad they change the course of history. John Frederick Parker, the man assigned to protect President Abraham Lincoln the night he was killed at Ford’s Theatre, is one of those ...
Dec. 7, 1941, was a day of infamy for the United States, as the Empire of Japan's naval and air forces savagely attacked American military forces in Hawaii. It was a sad day for the entire country, but it also marked a milestone that often goes ...
Cops love doughnuts. That’s the stereotype at least. Being caught in uniform with one of the delicious but unhealthy confections has long carried a certain stigma, but the real history behind the close relationship cops have with doughnuts is ...
This might come as a surprise, but not everything that comes out of an elephant’s ass has to taste like it came out of an elephant’s ass. And while flavor might not be the first thing most of us think of when we see elephant dung, that's not ...
No one was more serious about how he took his morning coffee than the classical composer Ludwig van Beethoven. Despite living in Vienna, whose coffeehouses are now considered an asset of intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO, Beethoven was unlikely ...
If you’re at the gym on any anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks and you see fully dressed firefighters walking toward the cardio area, don’t be alarmed. After all, the sight of firemen usually means you’re about to be rescued or a big problem is ...
Coffee gets credit for a lot of miraculous effects, whether deserved or not. It’s not going to stunt your growth, it won’t dehydrate you, and slamming coffee after a night of binge drinking won’t sober you up. Not even a little bit. No matter ...
Fear is not in John Nixon’s dictionary. Nor should it be. An elderly man, Nixon, who fought in the Korean War, had no reservations about stepping in to stop five armed punks from mugging a young woman in the Kentish Town area of London — despite ...
Making a good cup of coffee can be tricky, but making a passable cup of coffee really isn’t that hard. All anyone really needs is some ground beans and water and preferably a way to heat it. But any cup of coffee is a decent cup of coffee when ...
Contemporary wisdom tells us experiences deliver more lasting happiness than material things. After years of research, a psychologist at Cornell University concluded that we should spend our money on experiences, not things. With that in mind, ...
There are a lot of benefits one can get from drinking coffee. Studies show the right amount of coffee can lower your risk of Parkinson’s disease and Type 2 diabetes. It also has a protective effect on your liver, whatever that means. But history ...
Thanks to researchers at a Portuguese university, morning fun doesn’t have to end just because the coffeepot is empty. The remnants of your daily pour over are in the capable, jittery hands of scientists who have discovered a way to turn used coffee ...
