Posts by Noah Berman

Have you ever felt the need to curse someone, but weren’t sure how to go about such an antiquated ritual in your modern life? Well, if you don’t have a voodoo doll handy, I have a solution for you — ancient Roman curses. The ancient Romans were good at many things — engineering, warfare, politics,...

There are plot holes that go mostly unnoticed, where our brains just skip over the hiccup and pick up the stories and characters seamlessly on the other side, and then there are plot holes (like the ones that absolutely litter Frozen, omg) that make it impossible for us to take a movie seriously any longer....

It’s no secret that parenting can be as rough as it is rewarding. And the newborn stage dumps parents right into the deep end, where there seems to be no way to get to the other side of the crying, pooping, sleepless nights and leaky boobs and…I could keep going, but you get the point....

If you’ve never heard of the prison-industrial complex, you aren’t the only one. The term comes from the more famous 50s-era jargon “military-industrial complex”, and it refers to how the growth of the United States’ prison population has deep roots in corporate profit-making. Since this isn’t as far out in the public eye as perhaps...

It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: everybody poops. I know sometimes fecal discussions can make people uncomfortable, but excretion is really just a function of life (you should just be glad human digestive systems work in one direction). And because poop is a function of life, it also can be a matter of...

You know how knowledge just sometimes seems to filter into your mind, almost as if through osmosis? Like, one day you go to sleep, and the next day, you think that eating lots of carrots can make your night vision sharper? Yeah, well. That’s not how learning works. Myth 1: Eating carrots improves your eyesight....

In the last 100 years, enormous strides have been made in medicine – antibiotics, blood transfusions and pacemakers are all innovations of the 20th century. But while there have been major moves forward in diagnosing and treating physical illness, the way we manage mental illness has not made quite the same progress. Perhaps because they...

When you imagine an organic farm, I’ll bet you think of rolling green hills, rich block soil that clods together when you dig your hands into it, rows and rows of bright veggies, maybe even a few cows in the background, munching the pastures. That bucolic place probably does exist – but it’s also almost...

I had never heard about this until researching this article – but apparently, there’s a huge world of Denver International Airport (DEN) conspiracy theories. And, to be fair, there are some weird things about the airport. First off… it’s massive. Like, really big – 33,531 acres. That’s two times as big as Manhattan. DEN is 53...

A lot of what we think we know is wrong. That can be a tough thing to accept – but once you do accept it, you’ll find it a lot easier to correct your misbegotten beliefs! And really, isn’t that better? Cause if you know you’re wrong, you’re way closer to being right. And in...

We all hear stuff when we’re young that just stays in our brain – we’re built so that’ll happen. But even though this is handy for remembering when we should use our indoor voices, it also means that some of the things we pick up are bound to be wrong. Or maybe a lot of...

It seems silly to say, but Area 51 has nothing to do with aliens…as far as we know. Given what we do know though, it’s a pretty good bet that nothing extraterrestrial is hanging out in Nevada. Maybe you’ve heard the story of the 1947 Roswell, NM crash, one of hundreds of incidents that led to long-running...

Myth #1: Cops have to tell you they’re cops if you ask. You remember the awesome scene from that episode of Breaking Bad, where the junkie/meth seller gets taken in by the undercover cop even though he asked the guy if he was actually a cop, and the cop said he wasn’t? And they had...

In case my title didn’t quite get you on my level re: detoxification diets, let me make it extra clear – there is not one iota of scientific evidence that they work. There’s a bit of a mess to clear up here because there are just so many different detoxifying products being hawked out there,...

So it’s recently come to my attention that there are people out there who have some pretty serious misconceptions about the best subject of all time, bar none: dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, literally everyone can agree, are/were awesome. But I just want to clear a few things up. Starting with… Misconception number 1: That dinosaurs never existed....