Showing results by narrator "Nicholas Techosky" in All Categories

Facebook's founding is legend: In a Harvard dorm, wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg invented a new way to connect with friends...and the rest is history. But for the people who actually molded this great idea into a game-changing $300 billion company, the experience was far more tumultuous and uncertain than we might expect. Mike Hoefflinger was one of those Facebook insiders.

What brought on the bad dream was, of all things, an old-time Buick. Sam Fogel wasn’t into vehicles, certainly not collectibles. The forty-two-year-old college professor leaned more toward chamber music and theater and poetry as diversions, not expensive, environment-wrecking technology. But over breakfast one spring Saturday, Janie looked up from the Meadow Hills Observer and pointed to an article, suggesting that he take the children to the fairgrounds to see the auto show.

Meet Gregor Samsa, a humble young man who works as a fabric salesman to support his parents and sister. His life goes strangely awry when he wakes up late for work and discovers that, inexplicably, he is now a man-sized baby kitten. His family freaks out: Yes, their son is OMG so cute, but what good is cute when there are bills to pay? As his new feline identity threatens to eat away at his personality, Gregor desperately tries to survive this bizarre, bewhiskered ordeal by accomplishing the one thing he never could as a man: He must flee his parents’ house.

What makes couples break up? In Your Fault, writers and ex-lovers April Kim and Ryan Riley revisit their failed relationship in an honest attempt to come up with some answers. After meeting one night at a concert in a foreign city, April and Ryan immediately hit it off. But several months later, they found themselves fighting in taxis, in the bedroom, and just about everywhere else without really understanding the cause.

These stories present electric messiahs, identity constructs, the Beatles, and even a nuclear Armageddon, which serve as comic foils for Lain's everyman characters. Here is an America where packets of Sea Monkeys arrive in the mail containing secret messages, and the girl next door can breathe underwater. With Last Week's Apocalypse, Douglas Lain arrives with a punch line and a warning.

Slang, writes Michael Adams, is poetry on the down low, and sometimes lowdown poetry on the down low, but rarely, if ever, merely lowdown. It is the poetry of everyday speech, the people's poetry, and it deserves attention as language playing on the cusp of art. In Slang: The People's Poetry, Adams covers this perennially interesting subject in a serious but highly engaging way, illuminating the fundamental question "What is Slang" and defending slang - and all forms of nonstandard English - as integral parts of the American language.

Did you know that San Diego’s Frozen Zoo is home to preserved DNA samples from over 8,000 endangered or threatened species, or that the tell-tale smell of freshly mowed grass is actually the plant’s version of a distress call? And what about Henrietta Lacks, the “immortal woman” whose cancer cells have been divided and multiplied for research purposes for over 60 years? Even if you think you have a handle on all things trivia, you're guaranteed a big surprise with Now I Know: Science.

“If you have to puke, don’t puke on the bones,” I said. Laughter—bravado on the surface, nervousness underneath—skittered through the group of students. Most of the thirty bleary-eyed undergraduates milling outside the wooden gate of the Body Farm would be fine, but judging from my experience in prior years—and my assessment of several queasy-looking faces today—a couple of these kids would lose their breakfast.

There are sharps and flats. Majors and minors. And then there’s the sound of a Top 10 hit. That sound. It shouldn’t be so, of course. A song is, after all, a simple thing. At its heart, it’s just a collection of verses and choruses, maybe a bridge to stir things up and tie it all together. A few chords with a solo thrown into the middle. That’s all there is to it. And yet, for an art form that’s ruled by and relies upon mathematical patterns, there is still an unquantifiable quality that defies reason.

Did you know that Silly Putty is a by-product of World War II-era rubber rationing, or that the Anglo-Swedish War resulted in exactly zero direct deaths? And about the Richmond Golf Club, who posted an addendum to the official rules in case a round of golf was interrupted by a round of bombs dropped by the Nazi Luftwaffe? Now I Know: Military is the ultimate challenge for any know-it-all who thinks they have nothing left to learn about the military.

A middle-aged, African-American gentleman with a kindly face and mellow voice sat behind the wheel of his trolley and collected tickets from that evening’s passengers. A family of four—father, mother, and two teenage daughters—came aboard. The father, who’d been cajoled by his daughters to take the Savannah, Georgia, ghost tour, handed the driver their tickets and asked, “So what’s this Skippy Walker thing all about?”

Did you know that tug of war was once an Olympic Sport, or that President Teddy Roosevelt demanded that actions be taken to turn football into a more gentlemanly pastime? And what about Eddie Gaedel, the 3’7" pinch hitter for the St. Louis Browns who was nearly impossible to strike out? Even if you think you have a handle on all things trivia, you're guaranteed a big surprise with Now I Know: Sports. This special collection from the Now I Know archives will challenge your knowledge of the fascinating stories behind the world's greatest facts.

I ain’t been the same since that brawl. The paramedic said my palpitations would go away, but they got worse. It felt like my heart was fixin’ to jump right outta my throat. I knew this dude was gonna kill again. It made me sick worryin’ about it. I went to the clinic at the college and they sent me to a shrink. Not a real one, but one of them psych majors who’s gettin’ class credit workin’ in the office. I’m only janitorial services.

When Sunny Lytle is evicted for keeping her fur family of thirteen dogs, eight cats, two ferrets, and two rabbits in her apartment in Kentucky, she packs them into a converted school bus and returns to her hometown, DeLeon Springs, Florida. Her dream is to create a no-kill animal rescue, but survival soon takes top priority. Camping in the woods is no longer the peaceful haven of her teen years, and the brutal demands of nature and the threatening intervention of Rita, a well-meaning veterinarian, create an ongoing struggle.

Journalist Oliver Broudy spent a day talking with mega pop star Justin Bieber as they cruised Beverly Hills in his Rolls Phantom - shopping at Saint Laurent, dodging crazed fans, consulting his health guru, pumping iron at an elite club, and dining at Spago's. In the whisper quiet of the Rolls, Justin slowly reveals himself. After building a career on youthful charisma, he says he's finally ready to leave the boyish persona behind and become a man. But are you ready to believe him?

"If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s that logic is the sworn enemy of grief," writes Halimah Marcus, co-editor of Electric Literature, in her introduction to “Firewood," a hilarious and devastating story by J. Robert Lennon. "When the narrator’s wife (expectedly) leaves him, too devastated to admit the obvious, he concocts an impossible explanation for her disappearance. All I’ll say is that it involves the woodpile. The invented story is more horrible than the truth, but somehow easier to manage."

At the end of the 1960s, after surviving multiple assassination attempts, President John F. Kennedy has created a vast federal agency, the Psych Corps, dedicated to maintaining the nation's mental hygiene by any means necessary. Soldiers returning from Vietnam have their battlefield traumas "enfolded" - wiped from their memories through drugs and therapy. Any veterans too damaged to be enfolded roam at will in Michigan, evading the Psych Corps and reenacting atrocities on civilians.