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In the middle of winter when fogs and rains most abound they have a great festival which they call Exmas and for fifty days they prepare for it in the fashion I shall describe. First of all, every citizen is obliged to send to each of his friends and relations a square piece of hard paper stamped with a picture, which in their speech...

A pleasing little detail: In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1946 story “Rescue Party,” a federation of aliens visit Earth immediately before the sun explodes, hoping to rescue its inhabitants. To their surprise, they don’t find us (it turns out we’ve fled the planet), and they comb our deserted civilization. The explorers were particularly puzzled by one room — clearly an office of some kind —...

To disrupt German morale during World War II, the Allies hatched a plan to send anti-Nazi propaganda to German citizens through the mail. They quizzed prisoners of war about the German postal service and drew on local telephone directories to identify 2 million addressees who might receive forged letters and subversive material. Then the letters were loaded into counterfeit mailbags and dropped near destroyed...

This just caught my eye: In his manuscripts and notebooks, Alexander Pushkin often sketched the characters he was describing, as well as friends, family, romantic partners, and other literary figures. One biographer calls the drawings Pushkin’s graphic diary. This page is from his 1822 poem The Prisoner of the Caucasus.

A puzzle by Jared Z., Nicole H., and Benjamin E., mathematicians at the National Security Agency: The chief detective hurried down to the police station after hearing big news: there was a heist at Pi National Bank! The police had brought in seven known gang members seen leaving the scene of the crime. They belonged to the nefarious True/False Gang, so named because each...

condisciple n. a fellow student precariat n. people whose living standards are insecure scripturiency n. passion for writing refocillation n. imparting of new vigor This brass plate is displayed at the corner of Drummond Street and South Bridge, near Rutherford’s Bar, in Edinburgh: (Thanks, Nick.)

A right-handed writer named Wright In writing write always wrote rite When he meant to write write. If he’d written write right, Wright would not have wrought rot writing rite. — Anonymous

The goal of this logic puzzle is simple: to draw an orthogonally connected, non-intersecting loop that passes through every white square on the board. The trouble is that the board contains some number of black squares, and these are hidden. The only clues to their location are the numbers in the gray squares. In the diagram above, there are exactly 3 black squares in...

Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu are roughly antipodal. WONDER is UNDERWAY in Pig Latin. By convention, current flows from positive to negative in a circuit; electrons, which are negatively charged, move in the opposite direction. The immaculate conception describes the birth of Mary, not Jesus. “A man’s style in any art should be like his dress — it should attract as little attention as...

In a 2008 essay, computer scientist Paul Graham offered a hierarchy of verbal disagreement: “The most obvious advantage of classifying the forms of disagreement is that it will help people to evaluate what they read,” he wrote. “But the greatest benefit of disagreeing well is not just that it will make conversations better, but that it will make the people who have them happier....

In 1614, William Nealson, a trader in Japan for the British East India Company, wrote to his friend Richard Wickham. The first half of the letter is sensible enough, and Nealson notes that his associate Mr. Cocks has already written to Wickham, “wherein he hath informed you of all business, so as for me to write thereof should be but a tedious iteration.” But...

Modern punctuation doesn’t always do the job, so writers have suggested various improvements. In the 1580s, English printer Henry Denham proposed a “percontation point,” ⸮, to be used at the end of a rhetorical question. In 1668, Anglican clergyman John Wilkins suggested using an inverted exclamation point, ¡, for the same purpose. In the 1840s, Belgian newspaper publisher Marcellin Jobard introduced a small arrow...

Ghost leg is a method of establishing random pairings between any two sets of equal size. For example, it might be used to assign chores randomly to a group of people. The names of the participants are listed across the top of the diagram and the chores across the bottom, and a vertical line is drawn connecting each name to the chore below it....

From Lee Sallows: A feature common to many geomagic squares is that the set of shapes they employ reveal an atomic structure. That is, they are built up from repeated copies of a single unit shape. Examples of this are piece sets composed of polyominoes, the unit shape then being a (relatively small) square. For the would-be geomagic square constructor, a key advantage of...

“It is one of the misfortunes of life that one must read thousands of books only to discover that one need not have read them.” — Thomas De Quincey

The Journal International de Médecine carried a startling article in 1987: “Mise en Évidence Expérimentale d’une Organisation Tomatotopique chez la Soprano,” or “Experimental Demonstration of the Tomatotopic Organization in the Soprano (Cantatrix sopranica L.).” In it, author Georges Perec notes that throwing tomatoes at sopranos seems to induce a “yelling reaction” and sets out to understand why: Tomatoes (Tomato rungisia vulgaris) were thrown by...

A logic problem in the shape of a chess puzzle, by Éric Angelini. White has just moved. What was his move?

Peter Nicholson’s Carpenter’s New Guide of 1803 contains an interesting technique: To find a right line equal to any given Arch of a Circle. Divide the chord ab into four equal parts, set one part bc on the arch from a to d, and draw dc which will be nearly equal to half the arch. Apparently this was an item of carpentry lore in...

An 1897 article on curious wills in the Strand describes this 1813 will by the Rev. Hugh Worthington of Highbury Place, Islington. One side reads: Northampton Square, June 16th, 1813. I, Hugh Worthington, give and bequeath to my dear Eliza Price, who is my adopted child, all I do or may possess, real and personal, to be at her sole and entire disposal; and...

Just found this on Wikimedia Commons — “Where Is the Fifth Pig?”, an anonymous puzzle created in occupied Holland in 1940:

“The dogs are, by placing two lines upon them, to be suddenly aroused to life and made to run. Query, How and where should these lines be placed, and what should be the forms of them?”

John Grant McLoughlin offered this problem in Crux Mathematicorum in April 2008: Every four-digit numerical palindrome (e.g., 2772) is a multiple of 11. Why is this?

The River Welland used to split into two channels in the heart of Crowland, Lincolnshire, and in 1360 the townspeople arranged to bridge it with this unique triple arch, which elegantly spanned the streams at the point of their divergence, allowing pedestrians to reach any of the three shores by a single structure. The alternative would have been to build three separate bridges. The...

An intriguing photo caption from A Mind at Play, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman’s 2017 biography of AI pioneer Claude Shannon: Shannon set four goals for artificial intelligence to achieve by 2001: a chess-playing program that was crowned world champion, a poetry program that had a piece accepted by the New Yorker, a mathematical program that proved the elusive Riemann hypothesis, and, ‘most important,’...