From cursed video games like Polybius to haunted recordings, we explore the psychology behind our fear of haunted tech and our anxiety that our creations will turn on us.
Urban Legends 3 | Digital Nightmares: The Rise of the Online Legend
From the genesis of Slender Man on a forum to the moral panic of the Momo Challenge, discover how the internet, creepypasta, and collaborative storytelling have created a terrifyingly new breed of urban legend.
Sewer Alligators and Bodies in the Bed: The Shocking Urban Legends That Are Actually True
Think all urban legends are fake? Think again. We investigate the chilling cases, from sewer gators to hotel horrors, where unbelievable folklore has a basis in fact.
Urban Legends 2 | The Global Ghost: How One Urban Legend Changes Across the World
Travel the globe with the “Vanishing Hitchhiker” legend. Discover how this single story transforms into a Hawaiian goddess, a Latin American demon, and a Japanese ghost, reflecting each culture’s unique beliefs and fears.
The Babysitter is Calling from Inside the Patriarchy: A Feminist Guide to Urban Legends
Ever wonder why classic urban legends always star women in peril? We explore how tales like “The Hook” reflect deep societal anxieties about female independence.
Urban Legends 1 | The Lure of the Legend: Why Our Brains Believe Urban Legends
Explore the psychology behind urban legends. Learn how cognitive biases like confirmation bias and emotional narratives make us believe and share stories that aren’t true.
Anatomy of a Hoax: The Science of Why We Fall for Disinformation
Ever wonder why you fall for online hoaxes? Discover the cognitive biases and emotional triggers manipulators exploit and learn how to build your mental toolkit.
Recent Posts
A Hard Pill to Swallow | The Cure You Have to Get Past Your Throat
A poetic exploration of “a hard pill to swallow” — a phrase where the difficult thing is also the medicine, and everything depends on a few inches of throat.
You Don’t Find Your Voice. You Build It.
Everyone tells you to find your authentic voice, as if it were buried somewhere waiting. It isn’t. Voice is assembled from imitation, refusal, and repetition, and the people who have the strongest ones are usually the people who copied the most. Here’s how it actually works.
Опустить руки (Opustit’ ruki): The Arms Give Up First
A poetic dive into the Russian expression опустить руки, to lower the arms, and what neuroscience discovered when it went back and checked its most famous experiment.
The Polymath Advantage: Why Raising a Specialist Might Be the Riskiest Bet You Can Make
Our schools reward narrow expertise and treat broad curiosity as a lack of focus. But the evidence suggests the opposite: children who sample widely, connect ideas across fields, and resist premature specialization are the ones best equipped for a world that keeps rewriting the job description. Here is the case for range, the honest counterargument, and what to actually do about it.
Explaining Rules in English: How to Teach a Board Game Without Losing the Room
Learn the English of instructions — imperatives, must vs mustn’t vs don’t have to, the zero conditional for rules, and the precise language of rulebooks. Plus the teaching technique that fixes most bad explanations.
Sacrilegious: The Thief in the Temple
A poetic dive into “sacrilegious”; a word that literally means stealing sacred things, and what it tells us about how we still designate the untouchable.