On Earth Day in 1990, New York shut a major street and waited for chaos. The chaos never came, and a 1968 mathematical result may explain why, or may not.
Franz Kafka asked his closest friend to burn everything he had left unpublished. The friend refused, and the world gained a canon whose existence rests on disobedience.
A famous parable says shared resources are doomed, yet villages in India and elsewhere have long proved otherwise, and the hardest cases are the ones nobody can see.
The famous story that Einstein failed mathematics is false, yet it survives because it offers students a comfort that the true story somehow does not.
Continuing a failing project looks irrational until the cost of stopping is counted.
Betamax is often said to have lost despite being the better product, but the market was measuring something else.
Lizzie Borden walked free in 1893, and the verdict shows what a court can and cannot declare.
In a poem by Abhishek Leela Pandey, the sea and a woman drag the speaker in again and again, and every metaphor runs out before the pull does.
India ended its dependence on imported wheat within a decade, and the methods that delivered plenty are now draining the soil that grew it. Can a nation judge a success whose bill arrives half a century late?
When a former worker walked out of the Louvre in 1911 with a modest portrait under his smock, he removed a painting and, by most accounts, helped create an icon.
Easter Island became a warning about people who destroy their own world. New research asks whether the warning was aimed at the wrong culprit.
A reformulated soft drink beat its rivals in a vast programme of blind tastings and was withdrawn within three months. The data were not wrong. The question was.
Magna Carta was annulled by a pope within weeks of being sealed. Its afterlife in courts and parliaments has outlasted almost everything it originally said.
A radio play about Martians is remembered as the night America panicked. The evidence for the panic is thinner than the legend, and the first people to spread it may have been the ones who gained from it.
Removing a pump handle is said to have stopped a cholera outbreak in London. The truth is quieter, and it matters more.
The tulip crash is the most repeated warning in finance. Archives suggest the ruin was far smaller than the legend, which makes the warning harder to read.
Ambedkar warned that India was entering a life of contradictions, with equal votes and unequal lives. Seven decades later, the warning has neither expired nor been fulfilled.
Her most famous sentence was probably never hers. The story of how it stuck says more about the people who believed it.
A species flourished in a new land, and some called that a success. The beetles it was brought to fight tell another story.
The name Luddite is now an insult for anyone who fears technology. The workers who earned it were something more interesting.
A newspaper once told New York that dozens of neighbours watched a murder and did nothing. The story built a famous theory, and then the story itself began to fall apart.
Ashoka's edicts confess to the horror of Kalinga, and in the same breath warn the forest peoples of his power. The tension between a state's conscience and its coercion has never been resolved, in his empire or in the Republic that adopted his symbols.
In 1932 machine guns were sent against emus in Western Australia, and the birds won the first round. The story is usually told as comedy, yet it hides a real question about what kind of problem an army can solve.
Kodak is said to have died because it ignored its own invention. The record suggests a harder problem, that the future can be seen clearly and still be unprofitable to enter.
A careful remark in 1911 about four Arctic roots for snow grew into the belief that whole peoples live in different worlds. The belief is easier to repeat than to test.
Phineas Gage is the best known brain injury patient in history, and most of what is said about him is shakier than the textbooks admit. The more his case is studied, the less certain it becomes where a person actually lives.
Handwashing cut deaths in a Viennese maternity ward within months, and the physician who proved it was ignored. The refusal looks like arrogance in hindsight, yet it came from the same caution that protects science from error.
In 1943 millions starved in a province that, on much of the evidence, still held food. The economist who watched it as a child spent a career arguing that famines are not about what a country grows but about who is allowed to eat.
The statistician Abraham Wald is credited with telling the military to armour the parts of its bombers that showed no bullet holes. The advice sounds backwards until a reader asks which planes were never seen.
For decades managers were taught that workers improve simply because they are watched. A reanalysis of the original lighting records in 2011 found little sign of it.
A 1993 study of 36 students led a US governor to send classical music to every newborn in his state. The effect was small, short and probably not about Mozart at all.
Patients in a 2010 Harvard trial were handed a bottle labelled placebo and told that the pills held no medicine. Many of them improved anyway, and medicine has not yet agreed on why.
In 1971 a Stanford basement became a prison, and the world learned that ordinary people turn cruel when given power. The archive suggests that somebody told the guards what the experiment wanted to see.
The collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is taught as a lesson in resonance. Two engineers argued in 1991 that the lesson was wrong.
In 2014 a Berlin brain scan study linked heavy pornography use to a smaller reward region, and the headlines said the brain was shrinking. The study could not say that, and the argument it started is about meaning more than anatomy.
In the Odyssey the hero orders his crew to tie him to a mast so that he can hear a song that has killed every sailor before him. The knots look like the end of freedom, and the story has been used for three thousand years to argue that they are its proof.
The most quoted warning about bad incentives concerns snakes in Delhi that nobody has been able to find. The rats of Hanoi, which did exist, made the same point and were forgotten.
A cancer machine killed patients in the 1980s although every part did what it was built to do. The case shows how responsibility can vanish when a safeguard moves from metal into code.
A bowl mended with gold looks like a lesson in embracing flaws. The famous story behind it is thin, and the lesson may have arrived long after the craft.
The Athenians who invented democracy filled most offices by lottery, and Aristotle called elections the mark of oligarchy. The word we use for our own system may belong to a different idea.
Indian mathematicians were calculating with zero by the seventh century. Europe's bankers banned the numerals that carried it, and the word for it still holds the suspicion.
A famous film showed lemmings marching to their deaths in 1958. The scene was staged, and the myth it fed says more about the audience than about the animal.
In 1990 a magazine columnist gave a correct answer to a game show puzzle and was buried in angry letters from people with doctorates. The mistake that followed reached the greatest mathematicians too.
A popular story says Victorian doctors invented the vibrator to treat hysterical women. The tale has been repeated in films, plays and classrooms, and its own evidence is far thinner than its fame.
In 1973 a Stanford psychologist reported that psychiatrists could not tell healthy people from the mentally ill. Half a century later, the study itself is proving hard to tell from fiction.
Islanders in Vanuatu built airstrips and waited for planes that never came, and the world learned to laugh at them. The joke may reveal more about the laughers than about the waiting.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee considered Gandhi five times and never honoured him. Its reasons were serious, and they may say more about the meaning of peace than about the man.
A Disney nanny sang a thirty four letter word in 1964 and the Sherman brothers claimed to have made it up. A court disagreed, and the dispute exposes how little anyone knows about where words come from.
