The history of the McDonald's Happy Meal

Fast-casual restaurant Chili's is experiencing a resurgence, with its parent company recently reporting a nearly 32% increase in sales, thanks to passionate Gen Z fans on TikTok.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

The history of many kitchen appliances involves unexpected discoveries and applications, including wartime radar turned hamster defroster and replacing an 'ice king' with heat-stealing boxes.

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

See the most iconic photos from four decades of LIFE magazine

Hear about the 250-year history of the United States Postal Service, complete with some of its strangest deliveries, important innovations, and the figures that made it an American institution.

Domino's Pizza's 30-minute delivery guarantee was responsible for the chain's 1980s surge, but it was discontinued after the company was found liable for delivery driver accidents.

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.

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

The first horror movie is believed to be George Méliès' 1986 short 'The Haunted Castle,' which pioneered the use of special effects

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency—a form of digital currency with a wide variety of uses—created around popular 'memes,' or viral internet jokes.

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

'Shogun,' a 1980s TV series, helped popularize sushi in the US by stimulating an American interest in Japanese culture.

Hear 50 years of iconic hip-hop samples, the genre's foundational looped tracks

Sears sold DIY house kits starting at $600 in its famous catalog from 1908 through the 1940s, resulting in roughly 10,000 'Sears and Roebuck houses' being built.

Up to a million Girl Scouts sell about 200 million cookie boxes every spring, generating $800 million, largely because refusing a child is frowned upon

A vending machine run with Anthropic's AI went out of business after it was convinced to give away items for free and sell a video game console.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

The American cockroach is actually from Africa, an apparent hitchhiker aboard ships carrying enslaved people, with evidence suggesting the bug may have arrived in the New World as early as the 1600s.

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

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.

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

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

The animatronic shark from Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws,' the first modern blockbuster, was a complex underwater apparatus called 'Bruce.'

Jimmy Carter signed a 1978 bill that legalized home brewing, a move credited with kick-starting the craft beer industry.

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

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

Watch this video that uses Lego bricks to explain how venture capital works.

While the first exchange-traded fund (a 'basket' of different assets that can be bought and sold on a stock exchange) in the US only launched in 1993, the global ETF market has grown to more than $10T in the short time since.

In 1984, Operation Smash Hit intentionally crashed a 239-ton train into a nuclear waste canister at 100 miles per hour to prove the canister's safety, which remained completely intact and lost just 0.29 of its 100 pounds of pressure.

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.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

Learn how your body is, scientifically, like a firework with its own slow, controlled burn.

The US Constitution is widely regarded as the longest-standing written national constitution still in force—see how it has influenced rights worldwide.

Use this tool to calculate the dollar value of your parental mental load, from meal planning to coordinating after-school care, then see resources that help generate solutions.

See how Budweiser's famous Clydesdales spend their days at Warm Springs Ranch, where roughly 70 to 80 of the beer brand's giant horses can be found at any given time.

The 1987 Nintendo video game 'Stadium Events' isn't known for being particularly fun, but its scarcity has made it a highly sought-after item that has sold for up to $35K at auction.

Long before Major League Baseball began allowing instant replay for balls and strikes, an umpire reluctantly used the technology to determine whether a hit was a home run, a move that inadvertently ushered in a new era for the sport.

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

Dozens of S&P 500 stocks, including Coca-Cola and Walmart—known as the dividend aristocrats—have increased dividends every year for 25 years

For centuries, it was common to sleep in two shifts: a few hours at the beginning of the night, and a longer period beginning around midnight

Apollo astronauts left items in the moon's 'toss zone,' including golf balls, family photos, and bags of human waste, to make room for lunar rocks.

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

After the Boston Tea Party, colonists switched to coffee, which became the main morning drink for revolutionaries.

The most expensive ad of all time was for Chanel No. 5 perfume and cost roughly $33M to produce in 2004—about $57M in today's dollars.

The United States has had a tumultuous relationship with Cuba since its 1959 revolution, highlighted by a nuclear crisis and a decades-long trade embargo.

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.

Many legends about George Washington, including his supposed wooden teeth and the story of cutting down the cherry tree, lack evidence.

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