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 ...
How Ants Are Harvesting Coffee Beans in Brazil
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 ...
Coffee’s Creation Myth: How Coffee Conquered the World
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 ...
6 Must-Read Books for Every Coffee Enthusiast
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 ...
How Twin Convicts Beat a Death Sentence by Drinking Coffee
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 ...
How Gold Rush Inflation Sent Coffee Prices to the Highest in American History
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 ...
How Angie Dickinson’s ‘Police Woman’ Inspired a Generation of Women in Law Enforcement
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 ...
Firefighters Who Responded to Chernobyl Meltdown Had To Be Buried in Lead Coffins
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 ...
Preferring Black Coffee Is Part of Your Genetic Makeup
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 ...
How a Doctor and Paramedic Saved Each Other’s Life 30 Years Apart
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 ...
Coffee, Art, Capitalism — How Albania Is Repurposing Cold War Bunkers
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, ...
Cappuccino: How the World Got Sweet on a Creamy Concoction From the 17th Century
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 Legendary NYPD Cops Were the Real-Life Inspiration for ‘Starsky and Hutch’
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 ...
How a 1970s TV Show Helped Bring Emergency Medical Services to the Entire US
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 ...
Research Shows Just the Smell of Coffee Can Improve Performance
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 ...
‘Satan’s Drink’: Before Christians Would Drink It, Coffee Had to Find Jesus
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 ...
A Brief History of Trying (in Vain) To Replace Coffee With Chicory
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 ...
Carlos Hathcock Was the ‘American Sniper’ of The Vietnam War
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 ...
The Degenerate Cop Guarding Lincoln the Night He Was Killed Drank With the Assassin
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 ...
The Day ‘Hell Rained Down’ on the Only Firefighters Killed by a Foreign Power on US Soil
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 ...
Why Cops Love Doughnuts — An Origin Story
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 ...
Black Ivory Coffee: The World’s Most Expensive Coffee Is (the) Shit
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 ...
How to Make Coffee the Way Beethoven Liked It
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 ...
This Is the Nationwide Firefighters’ 9/11 Remembrance Ritual
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 ...
Researchers: Drinking Coffee Might Help Prevent Suicide, Among Other Health Benefits
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 ...
That Time an 88-Year-Old Korean War Veteran Karate Chopped Would-Be Robbers in London
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 ...
German Soldiers Tried to Make Coffee Using Flamethrower Fuel — and 600 Died
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 ...
6 Places To Have an Incredible Coffee Experience Before You Die
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, ...
The Highly Caffeinated Life of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Chain-Smoking D-Day Mastermind Who Became President
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 ...
Scientists Discovered How to Ferment Coffee Grounds into 80-Proof Liquor
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 ...