On February 4, 1974, publishing heiress Patty Hearst was taken from her Berkeley, California, apartment—but Hearst is far from the only abduction case to have captured public attention.

LISTS
Mother Nature can be scary, as these films full of homicidal bunnies, pissed-off piranhas, and one mutated bear prove.
The zombie apocalypse isn’t as far off as you’d think. Which means it's better to be safe than sorry.
The Internet Archive has more than 8500 MS-DOS games online, and they’re playable in nearly any browser. Prepare to kiss your free time goodbye.
Don’t throw money out the (poorly insulated) window this winter. Follow these tips for easy and cheap ways to save money on your heating bill.
The NYPL shares its most-borrowed titles, including a royal memoir and a fictional romance between video game developers.
Though it’s now considered one of Pablo Picasso’s masterpieces, ‘Guernica’ didn’t have many fans when it debuted—one critic even called the artwork “one of the poorest things produced in the world.”
With dolphins masquerading as whales, lizards as toads, and marsupials as bears, it can be tough to keep track of which animals are which.
From record-breaking plants and incredible animal news to space superlatives and the awesome power of Taylor Swift fans, here’s the long list of things we learned in 2023.
Car salespeople use a number of tricks to make a sale.
These unusual animals are in the same taxonomic group as cats, but there isn’t much family resemblance.
The two dialects have transformed to the point that North Korean defectors often struggle with unfamiliar language when arriving in South Korea—so much that the South Korean government publishes a list of commonly confused words to aid new defectors.
Even if you've seen the Broadway musical 'Hamilton,' there's probably a lot you don't know about this enigmatic founding father.
You may know Austin, Texas, as the Live Musical Capital of the World that’s devoted to keepin’ itself weird—but you might not be familiar with the city’s many slang terms.
American writer Gertrude Stein left a profound mark on 20th-century modernism through her literary work and her enthusiastic patronage of avant-garde art. Read on for more facts about her idiosyncratic life.
Box office success does not always equal critical acclaim. But many of the biggest hits of the 1990s are still being talked about, and revisited, today.
From Celine Dion’s “erotic motorcycle” to the crafty female platypus who faked a pregnancy in order to bust out of the Bronx Zoo, 2023 was full of some pretty great stories.
From pronouncing the name of one of the Beastie Boys to how to say “Sade” correctly, here are a few tips for your tongue.
Here are a few things about this iconic piece of literature that might not have been covered in your high school English class.
Exolangs are constructed languages that imagine how the languages of extraterrestrial beings might look and sound—and linguists have come up with some pretty mind-bending options.
As midnight approaches on December 31, more than a few of us will pop open a bottle or two of champagne to help ring in the New Year. Here are a few nuggets you can share with fellow revelers.
The internet has given us all kinds of delightful slang terms for what our cats and dogs do, from ‘blep’ and ‘bork’ to ‘smol’ and ‘sploot.’