Tired of doomscrolling? Subscribe to something actually interesting
A while ago I was searching for something interesting to read about and instead, I found myself doomscrolling short videos of cats, people falling over, and angry morons getting instant comeuppance. After ten minutes, I feeling a bit fed up and depressed with my fellow humans (not cats though).
I craved something that was both interesting and educational. Like a five minute newsletter version of QI. Apart from actually watching QI or rereading The Theory of Everything Else: A Voyage Into the World of the Weird By Dan Schreiber (that was affiliate – you can read my review here) I didn’t find much.
During lockdown, I had written some stories on Medium that about things I found interesting and thought I would share. Medium seems to be dying a slow death at the moment, so I repurposed some stories and moved them to Substack. I then wrote some more stories and found that a weekly newsletter was the sort of thing people really seemed to enjoy, and subscribers shot up fast. Which was nice.
A 5 minute burst of interesting stuff from across history and culture
Intriguing Times is a weekly newsletter that looks at fascinating stories from across cultures and history. Most stories take around five minutes to read and designed to make you think “Huh, that’s interesting.” When they were on Medium, a couple went viral with 60,000 or more reads, so it wasn’t just me looking for this kind of thing.
At time of writing, these are currently free to read:
- North Korean Hotel Of Doom Deserted For 35 Years – It has 105 floors, is in the capital, and at one point didn’t officially exist.
- What Did People Wipe With In The Past And Why Is The World Moving Beyond Toilet Paper?
- The Interesting Tale Of The Man Who Accidentally Broke Into The Bank Of England
- The Tragic Tale Of The Only Jockey To Win A Race While Dead: The Unfortunate Frank Hayes
Previous stories have included:
- The Incredible Story Of The Gorilla Raised As A Boy In An English Village.
- The Potsdam Giants: How A Prussian King’s Obsession Led To Kidnapping, Torture, And Eugenics
- The Surprising Star Trek, Cheers & Frasier Connections You Never Knew
(These may or may not be archived by the time you read this.)
If you find any of those topics interesting and fancy a weekly read to escape the misery of social media, you can find Intriguing Times here. Enjoy!
