David Given Schwarm

Recent studies of marine mammals have revealed the perplexing fact that baby killer whales don’t sleep at all during their first month on Earth. The explanation concocted by scientists is that the whales are at risk of freezing to death in the inhospitable waters until they acquire the blubber that insulates them. As you head…

One of the most famous mountain climbers of the last twenty-five years is Joe Simpson, known not for the number of peaks he’s scaled, but for the nightmarish climb gone awry in 1985. As captured in his book (and later the movie)Touching the Void, Simpson shattered his leg on a snowy, storym descent, and fell…

Among the weird places where writers find inspiration, the shower is one of the more common. “Your body is totally relaxed and your mind is totally relaxed,” says Ray Bradbury of his trips to the steamy plot chamber, “then the little explosions, the little revelations come.” Spend some time today investigation those places and situations…

A friend of mine, who is an EMT, says that people at restaurants choke more often than you’d imagine. According to him, the real danger isn’t choking, it’s the bathroom. Because the moment people get a chicken wing lodged in their throats, the do a curious thing: They use the last of their oxygen to…

So many of the things we take as a given in everyday life were actually the result of a bitter struggle between two opposing forces. Take, for example, the custom of saying “Hello?” when answering the phone. It seems like a natural extension of a face-to-face conversation, right? I telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell had…

Weird fact: Before Jerry Springer launched his brawling freak show on daytime TV, he was a serious progressive politician and highly respected mayor of Cincinnati. In his heyday, many Ohioans even saw him as a likely candidate for the U.S. presidency. As you begin worrying that you might be pushing the bounds of believability for…