The fictional children who ran away to live in the Met

Child prodigy writer Barbara Newhall Follett mysteriously disappeared in 1939

She published her first book at age 12 to much critical acclaim. She then did the same two years later. But by 25 she was married and struggling to publish another manuscript. One day, she left her apartment and never returned. The case was never solved.

L. Frank Baum aimed to make 'Oz' a modern fairy tale

Baum began writing stories for children while working as a traveling salesman and found success with 1899’s “Father Goose, His Book,” a book of nursery rhymes. Its popularity made him realize children did not want moral education; they wanted escapism.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, explained

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, founded in 1870, houses 1.5 million works spanning centuries—from ancient Egyptian artifacts to impressionist masterpieces. Its iconic Fifth Avenue building, designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt, and tranquil Cloisters location reflect its dedication to showcasing global creativity.

Finding the way home through flavor

In the fall of 1996, 9-year-old Alvin Chang rushed into his family's kitchen to find his grandmother making his absolute favorite dish: kimchi. This interactive story follows Chang's yearslong attempt to recreate the flavor from his childhood home.

A map of WWII refugees and their stories

Trace the paths of different people and families on this interactive map as they made their escape from the Nazi regime. Primary and secondary sources like letters, documents, memoirs and diaries, photos, interviews, and news clippings showed how many found a path to freedom, from the Kindertransport to individual stories.

In 'Frankenstein,' Mary Shelley questioned both Romantic and Enlightenment ideals

The classic monster story is a richly philosophical tale about the role of technology, written by Shelley at the age of 18. This podcast episode explores Shelley's deeper intentions with the story and debunks some of the popular misconceptions about its plot and meaning.

The story behind one iconic meme

The 2012 post titled "Just a book owners smile" shows 11-year-old Maggie Goldenberger—resplendent in her braces, pigtails, and treasure map-like vest—holding a trio of Goosebumps books and grinning wildly at the camera. Another user quickly captioned it, "GERSBERMS. MAH FRAVRIT BERKS."

At 18, Eleanor taught immigrant children in one of New York's poorest neighborhoods

After finishing school in London, Roosevelt returned to New York and volunteered at a settlement house on Rivington Street in the Lower East Side, working directly with immigrant families living in poverty.

'Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators' featured 'Hitch' as a character

The young adult detective novels, which ran from 1964 to 1987, prominently featured Hitchcock's name on their covers and included introductions supposedly written by the author. Hitchcock was also a character in the books, working with the young detectives. His name was removed after the 30th book was released.

Explore the unexpected ways people use public libraries in this 'This American Life' episode

Libraries serve as far more than book repositories. This episode follows a family experiencing homelessness that spent months living in their local library, Iranian students reuniting with family across the US-Canada border because the library straddled both countries, and a Vermont man who built his own library to house unpublished manuscripts.

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

Several bestsellers began as fan fiction

Ali Hazlewood's "The Love Hypothesis" began as "Star Wars" fan fiction. Cassandra Clare's "Mortal Instruments" series was about "Harry Potter" characters Draco Malfoy and Ginny Weasley. Anna Todd's "After" series was an example of "real life fiction," or fan fiction that is about real people rather than fictional ones (the books were originally based on the boy band One Direction).

Explore the French palace royals fled from during the 1789 revolution

This virtual reality tour lets viewers explore the Palace of Versailles, which King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were forced to flee during the French Revolution. Versailles was later made a public establishment by order of King...

That time two journalists raced around the world in 80 days

In 1889, Journalist Nellie Bly, née Elizabeth Jane Cochran, set sail on a journey around the world to compete with Phileas Fogg, the protagonist of the 1872 fiction novel "Around the World in Eighty Days." This short video explains how competing...

Searching for 'The Great Gatsby' in Kentucky

F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel "The Great Gatsby" is usually associated with New York and its extremely wealthy enclaves, but this Atlas Obscura podcast tracks down another location Fitzgerald portrayed in the book: Louisville, Kentucky, the setting for Daisy and Tom Buchanan's wedding, as well as the place where Fitzgerald spent two miserable months during World War I.

The story of two female programmers running the simulations behind chaos theory's discovery

Margaret Hamilton and Ellen Fetter worked on MIT's 800-pound Royal McBee LGP-30 computer, which was fed binary code on paper tape to perform computations. Among the computations performed were those involving equations describing the motion of gas in a circulating fluid for Edward Lorenz, widely considered the father of chaos theory.

Long-lost sisters meet for the first time and accidentally show up in the same dress

Two women aged 51 and 63 discovered they were sisters after taking a 23andMe test. Both born in Russia, the siblings immigrated to the US around the same time. When the time came to finally meet, they coincidentally arrived wearing the same outfit.

‘Sentimental Journeys’ first suggested the Central Park Five's innocence

In 1989, after a young white woman jogging in Central Park was brutally assaulted, police rushed to charge five Black and Hispanic teenagers with the crime. As outrage against the group grew publicly, Didion shared details of a flawed investigation and argued race-based hatred served as motivation against the youths.

How one young woman opted out of her orthodox Jewish community

Runner Connie Allen was raised in an ultra-orthodox sect of Hasidic Judaism known as Satmar in South Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York. This long read details the rigid life of a contemporary Jewish community in New York, and how one young woman opted to leave it.

A stolen Norman Rockwell painting was found in Stephen Spielberg's collection

In 1989, the famed director purchased "Russian Schoolroom" from a legitimate dealer. He remained unaware that it was looted years prior from a gallery in Missouri until his staff spotted the painting on an FBI list of stolen works of art. In 2007, the FBI confirmed its authenticity.

One graffiti artist turned a train tunnel into his gallery

Chris Pape, also known as Freedom, began exploring a tunnel under Manhattan's Riverside Park when he was a kid. As he grew more involved with graffiti, he turned its walls into a massive art project, one that reflected both the history of graffiti and the people who made the tunnel their home.

Seventeen strange historical heists

High-dollar chocolate and cheese robberies to art thefts and audacious train robberies. Explore history's most peculiar stories of stealing with this list of seventeen tales of burglaries.

A 2015 Algerian novel reconsiders Camus' 'The Stranger'

Kamel Daoud's "The Meursault Investigation" exists in the same universe as Camus' famous novel, but it expands the world to imagine the story from the Arab Algerian perspective, showing the impact its main character's actions had on real people. Rather than focusing on the existential awakening of one man, it considers the longtail impact of colonialism in Algeria.

'I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.'

- American novelist Eudora Welty (1909-2001)

The first robot in literature may have been a 'mechanical man' in 1907's 'Ozma of Oz,' a book in L Frank Baum's 'Wizard of Oz' series.

Take a tour of Charles Dickens' London

Much of Dickens' fiction concerns Victorian London and its people. This tour of the city, led by Dickens biographer Simon Callow, walks you through significant sites, like the place where Dickens' parents were married, the shoe-blacking factory where he worked as a boy, and the place where he created his first magazine.

In 2009, the nation was gripped by the story of a missing young boy who was believed to be floating over Colorado in a homemade balloon, until it was revealed that he was at home the whole time.

A day in the life of Bodo and Ermentrude, 8th century Frankish peasants

The manor was the basic unit of economic and social structures in medieval Europe, where peasants worked the land and served the monastery, all with the feudal lord at the top. This account details a pair of peasants pulled from a real-life manorial account from what is France today.

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, but became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.

'Saturday Night Fever,' the 1977 film that introduced disco to the mainstream, was based on a fabricated magazine story.

In 1963, a basement renovation in Turkey revealed a passageway to a hidden, multilevel underground city that once housed as many as 20,000 people

The Mona Lisa's celebrity status and repeated restorations have obscured what made the painting so revolutionary for its time

The tragic Pulitzer Prize-winning image 'The Vulture and the Little Girl' (1993) generated controversy, raised concerns about ethics in photography, and eventually led to the photographer's death.

When a Paris department store hesitated to sell Estée Lauder's perfume, she 'accidentally' broke a bottle, causing the smell to spread throughout the store and shoppers to start asking to buy the scent.

American short story writer Flannery O'Connor raised 40 peacocks, which became potent symbols for her fiction's elegant violence

20,000 letters to the advice columnist 'Dear Abby' provide insight into prevailing sex, religion, and LGBTQ fears, anxieties, and concerns from the 1950s onward.

The Ramones' 'Pet Sematary,' the theme song for the Stephen King novel of the same name, was written while the band was admiring the writer's collection of horror memorabilia.

The idea for the Federal Reserve was conceived in secret in 1910—with bankers donning duck hunt gear for disguise while traveling to a remote country club on Georgia's Jekyll Island

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

The story of Dollree Mapp, whose legal challenge over her 1957 conviction for possessing "obscene material" led to a major strengthening of the Fourth Amendment

Clever Hans was a 1900s horse that was believed to be able to solve math equations, tell time, and read and comprehend German, until a psychology student discovered how he got his answers.

Learn more about the history of fireworks, which dates back to an accidental invention during an alchemist's quest for information about immortality.

After her fellow cult members tried to kill her with an LSD-infused hamburger, one member of the Manson Family, the murderous cult led by Charles Manson, decided to testify against the group's leader.

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

Some Pokémon have been named after real and fictional organisms, while some real-world species have been named after Pokémon, such as Chilicola charizard and Binburrum zapdos.

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

The first line of 'immortal' human cells, which can divide indefinitely and are used in scientific research, was nonconsensually taken from a Black woman.

Track the location of the Voyager probes, currently between 13 and 15 billion miles away from Earth.

Play the role of a student in a game where you try to navigate college and remain debt-free, selecting different income levels, high school experience, race, ethnicity, and more.

While atoms are normally made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, exotic ones have been built with antimatter—alternate versions of normal matter that live for fractions of a second and are about a billion times as rare.