Utterly Interesting

At Place du Colonel Fabien in Paris's working class 19th arrondissement sits one of the strangest buildings in the city, a rippling white and glass structure that looks more like something from a science fiction film than the administrative home of a poli

On 12 February 1979, an unknown 20-year-old dancer walked into a New York photography studio to earn a few dollars posing for an evening class. She gave her name as Madonna Ciccone. Six years later, the resulting photographs would spark a bidding war betw

In the early 1950s, a model named Marguerite Hamrick posed for a series of photographs headed for one of America's nudist magazines, and before anyone even loaded the camera, she had to shave. It wasn't a style choice. Federal rules at the time simply wou

On 19 May 1992, a 17-year-old named Amy Fisher rang the doorbell of a house in Massapequa, Long Island, and shot the woman who answered it in the head. The woman, Mary Jo Buttafuoco, survived, permanently disfigured and partially deaf. The man at the cent

On the night of December 3rd, 1926, the best-selling crime novelist in the world went missing from her own house. No note, no witnesses, no body. Just an abandoned car hanging off the edge of a chalk pit and a country that spent the next eleven days losin

On 25 March 1931, a white teenager walking across the top of a freight car in northern Alabama stepped on the hand of a Black teenager named Haywood Patterson, who was hanging on to the side of the same train. A fight broke out. By the time it ended, a po

Huddie Ledbetter spent a combined fifteen or so years behind bars for a killing and a stabbing, and somewhere in between those two prison terms he became one of the most influential musicians America has ever produced. He wrote or preserved songs that wou

In 1922, a newspaper columnist wrote that only two people in America could bring every reporter in New York down to the docks just to watch them leave the country. One was the sitting President. The other was a twenty-year-old Ziegfeld Follies dancer name

Lee Harvey Oswald never stood trial for killing President Kennedy. Jack Ruby shot him dead in a Dallas police basement two days after the assassination, and the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald acted alone was delivered without ever being tested

In November 1934, retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler sat down in front of a congressional committee and calmly explained that a group of wealthy businessmen had spent the previous year trying to recruit him to lead a private army of half a