The (Daily) Oklahoman, Jun. 17, 2003

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New Magazine Makes Learning Fun With Humor
By Diane Clay, staff writer

Kids, jobs, marriages, dogs, cats, fish, frogs, birds, rush hour and yard work don't give today's folks much time to learn the atomic number of Einsteinium or why swans don't really sing before they die.

Such facts usually aren't worth the effort, which is why the feverish popularity of a new education magazine baffles industry critics and its founders — a group of recently graduated college students who thought learning could be fun.

The mission of the magazine mental_floss is to teach readers what they should have learned in college but "were too hung over to remember." It wants to cover items schools don't teach but that readers always wanted to know (such as the workings of the electric chair), and help readers learn what they were too intimidated to ask about because the issues seemed too complex.

Creators mixed in a little silliness and a lot of humor, selling thousands of covers a month.

"It's really tough to explain this cultural phenomenon," said Will Pearson, co-founder and president of mental_floss magazine.

"Most of our readers are busy professionals who work all day and have 15 minutes to read. They want to be entertained, but they also want to walk away knowing they've learned something."

The idea for the magazine was born out of a dorm room discussion among four or five Duke University students, who often gathered at night to chat.

One night, an episode of television's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" sparked a discussion about how people want to feel smart, look smart and how it seemed to feel good to feel smart. Unfortunately, they thought, most forms of education don't seem interesting, inspiring or entertaining.

They scoured local book stores, libraries and the Internet for entertaining education materials, but found nothing that satisfied them. So, they created their own outlet for fun facts.

The new educational magazine boasts features such as the "10 Not-So-Bright Ideas in Science," which chronicles strange research projects such as the intricacies of ostriches courting humans, and "The Why Files," which tackles such pressing questions as why the sky is blue, why some people are left-handed and why tennis balls are fuzzy.

These are packaged with the quiz of the day and fact of the day on the magazine's Web site (www.mentalfloss.com).

mental_floss writers skip politics and current events, choosing instead to cover topics "people feel like they were supposed to have learned such as who was Alexander the Great or what are the Dead Sea Scrolls," Pearson said.

"They throw out one sentence and then they draw a blank, but they know they should know this."

The magazine has attracted 10,000 subscribers with 60,000 copies on bookstore shelves since it moved from a college rag to a national publication at the end of 2001. The magazine hits Wal-Mart shelves for the first time this week.

Lynn Hester, a humor expert who works with patients at Integris Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City, said she isn't surprised a magazine that covers serious topics with a sense of humor is successful.

Hester said humor is often the way people deal with serious topics and situations. It relieves the stress of trying to remember Einstein's theory of relativity or wondering when and why people started yelling "Geronimo" before jumping from any height.

It turns out yelling "Geronimo" was started by Geronimo himself, while he was escaping soldiers in what is now Oklahoma.

"If you can rephrase something that is too difficult or too boring, ... we can begin to see it in a different light and it's more entertaining," Hester said.

Some boring topics made interesting include a brief history of corn, including the fact that the average ear of corn has 16 rows of kernels, why a chloroform-soaked cloth over the mouths doesn't really make people instantly drop to the ground as in the movies and the origin of the little, green Martians idea.

"We don't know why people want to know this stuff," Pearson said, "but for one reason or another, people do. They enjoy it."

Copyright © 2003 The Oklahoman