During the World War II Nazi occupation of France, there were many who were desperate to flee the country. Jewish people, exposed French Resistance members, and frankly, anyone who feared the Nazis wanted out. There were organized escape routes, but they were so secretive that many who worked for these networks did not know who else was involved, and they did not use their real names anyway. One of these escape schemes was run by a Dr. Eugène. The French Gestapo investigated, to the point of torturing potential escapees into exposing him, but Dr. Eugène managed to slip through their hands.

Throughout 1943, French Gestapo agents continued to assemble their dossier on this elusive Dr. Eugène. They learned that he had a surprisingly large network of agents combing Paris for Jews seeking extraction, and that the beauty parlor at 25 Rue des Mathurins was the network’s primary clearinghouse for escapees. Whenever an escapee-to-be arrived at the parlor, if the doctor decided he would furnish his services, he would instruct them to return at a specific time and date, prepared for departure. The escapee must have already concluded all of their affairs in France, including goodbyes to loved ones. They were to produce 10 passport-style photos for use in forged travel documents⁠—five portraits and five in profile. No more than two adults could travel together, and no more than two suitcases per person. Escapees were told to amass their cash and valuables, and hide them in their luggage and in their clothing. Part of the cash was for the network’s fee, the rest to pay for travel and to establish a new life. Importantly, escapees must leave behind all identifying documents so they would not be caught with conflicting names or initials. This included any monogrammed clothing or luggage.

As the war dragged on, the story takes quite a turn. Besides setting the stage, it's not even a World War II story. Read about the mysterious and elusive Dr. Eugène and his elaborate scheme at Damn Interesting. Beware that it is pretty gruesome. Also available in podcast form.

We think of flappers as the trend-setting women of the Roaring Twenties, but the style was introduced years earlier. Dancers Vernon and Irene Castle brought jazz music and the dances that go with it to America in 1912. America ate them up.

They popularised dances like the foxtrot, the waltz, the maxixe, the tango, and the bunny hug. They opened a dancing school across from Manhattan’s Ritz Hotel and their supper club, “Castles in the Air”, was located on a Broadway theatre’s roof. They also had a nightclub called “Castles by the Sea” on the Long Beach broadwalk and their own restaurant, the “Sans Souci”.

But the Castles, particularly Irene, did not just start trends on stage. She became a fashion trendsetter in every sense of the word, and came to be known as America’s Best Dressed Woman. What came after her was a fashion revolution – the perspective on style and dress changed completely.

Castle dressed in ways that made dancing easier- shorter skirts, no corset, and a stylish band to hold her hair. When she cut her hair short, suddenly young women all over wanted the "Castle bob." Read about Irene Castle and how her style influenced flapper culture at Messy Nessy Chic.

Once upon a time, animation in feature films was a tedious, expensive process. Each animation cel went through numerous processes. First they were hand-sketched, then cleaned up, then copied, then colored. The 1959 film Sleeping Beauty required a million animated cels that went through numerous hands, at a cost of six million dollars. And then it only made five million in its initial run. Something had to change.

Take a closer look at Walt Disney’s 1961 animated One Hundred and One Dalmatians film, and you may notice its animation style looks a little different from its predecessors. With its dark outlines defining characters from backgrounds, its departure from the subtle and sensitive animation of Sleeping Beauty just two years prior was considered jarring to some.

That’s because the film is completely Xeroxed. The technology, invented by American physicist Chester Carlson in the 1940s, completely streamlined the animation process, and ultimately saved Disney’s beloved animation department.

One Hundred and One Dalmatians proved that a good story and cute animals were more important than beautiful artwork, or at least more cost-effective. Read how Disney adopted Xerox technology and how it changed the industry at Smithsonian.

Russia has always relied on apples for sustenance and delicious treats. One that was particularly popular among 19th-century aristocrats was pastila, a dessert that may remind you of marshmallow, meringue, or divinity, made from apples. And like those fluffy sweets, it once required lots of elbow grease, as Russian food expert Darra Goldstein explains.

In the days before electricity, making pastila was painful labor. Without a mechanical mixer, beating cooked apples into fluff had to be done by hand. One “particularly exquisite” 19th-century variety, says Goldstein, had to be beaten for an agonizing 48 straight hours. “So in Russia, you had serfs and they were in the kitchen and they were whipping the pastila,” notes Goldstein. “So it wasn’t any effort on the part of the people who would be enjoying it.”

Cue the Russian Revolution. Under the restrictions and scarcities of the Soviet Union, pastila slowly faded away. “It wasn’t part of the necessary food groups,” says Goldstein. “It was hard enough for them to get basic foods to market, which they didn’t succeed in doing either.” Many of Russia’s traditional, unusual, or unique foods met the same fate. But recently, there has been a massive upswing of interest in recovering ancestral Russian recipes. A decade ago, my friend Stas took notice that the interest in restoring Russian foodways became mainstream. To him, it was especially poignant. “We always grew up thinking that a lot of our culture had been just completely obliterated,” he says. “Then there’s this wave of people unearthing really old recipes such as Belyov pastila. And so everybody’s like, holy shit, this is what this thing is supposed to look like.”

The rise of electrical appliances has made pastille accessible again. And if you want to try it out yourself, you can get a recipe for pastila at Atlas Obscura along with the history of the dish.

A fellow who goes by ModernDayCaveman was recently released after 26 years in prison. In this video, he goes into a Walmart for the first time. He's just looking for a box of Cheerios, and is astonished to find he can select from ten different kinds. Watch him confront chips, too. The production values are awful, but his reactions are so wholesome it doesn't matter. -via Digg

The Superhero Club at Facebook ran images of Marvel's Avengers through FaceApp to change their gender. The results look eerily believable -except for the Hulk, who is always a cartoon.

The app changes facial dimensions slightly, like widening the cheekbones for females and narrowing them for males. It also adds makeup to female versions, and removes it for male versions. You might notice that when changing a male superhero into a female, the app removes ten years of age. When changing a female into a male, the two characters look the same young age. You can see all 14 of them in a post at Geeks Are Sexy.

While the characters look like the same person or siblings, I could swear that the female version of Captain America is an actress I've seen somewhere.

The game Monopoly can be cutthroat, but its most enduring feature is that it takes a long time. While some of that has to do with how evenly matched the players and their motivations are, the ultimate outcome depends on the roll of the dice. If the dice fall just so, the game can be quite short.

After our recent attempt to play the shortest actual game of Monopoly on record, we started to wonder about what the shortest THEORETICALLY POSSIBLE game of Monopoly would be. That is, if everything went just the right way, with just the right sequence of rolls, Chance and Community Chest cards, and so on, what is the quickest way one player could go bankrupt? After working on the problem for a while, we boiled it down to a 4-turn (2 per player), 9 roll (including doubles) game. Detail on each move given below. If executed quickly enough, this theoretical game can be played in 21 seconds (see video below).

It's been a long time since I played the game, so I had forgotten that a turn can be extended with a double roll. The guys at scatterplot explain how a game can end in sudden death, with a very short bonus video to demonstration it. Personally, if confronted with a group who wanted to play Monopoly, I would go bankrupt as quickly as I could, in order to go do something else. -via Boing Boing

Gruinard Island in Scotland was once a British biological warfare testing area. But that's just a prelude to the story Tom Scott tells us about the island and what happened decades later in 1986. The story doesn't even have much to do with anthrax and nothing at all to do with biological warfare. In fact, it might make you grin.

Medieval artworks, illuminations, and marginalia include some really weird scenes that defy modern interpretation. However, the world is full of people who will give it a try, just to be funny. If you are one of them, you’ll be intrigued by the Medieval Meme Generator. Choose an image from a collection from the KB National Library of the Netherlands, read about the image to find its intended meaning, and add your own punch line. There are 15 images now available (some may be considered NSFW), and they will be switched out every three months or so. Even if you don’t want to create jokes with them, exploring the history of these really weird images is a good use of your free time. -via Nag on the Lake

Napoleon Bonaparte and his wife Josephine are often cited in lists of the world's greatest love affairs, but Napoleon wouldn't let a little thing like love get in the way of his ambitions. When he married Joséphine de Beauharnais, his second wife was the five-year-old daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, and an Austrian princess. Marie Louise grew up with her country constantly at war with France. She referred to Napoleon as the Anti-Christ. Napoleon's forces ultimately defeated Austria's -twice.

In December 1809, Napoleon ended his 13-year marriage to Josephine because of her failure to provide him with an heir. He wanted a new, fertile wife from one of Europe’s royal families, thinking that this would add legitimacy to his regime. Hoping to cement the new Franco-Austrian alliance, he settled on Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria. At first Marie Louise couldn’t believe that Napoleon would want to marry his enemy’s daughter, or that her father would consent to the match. Her stepmother, Maria Ludovika, was strongly opposed. However, Francis I and his foreign minister, Clemens von Metternich, saw the proposal through the eyes of statecraft, as a means of securing some years of peace during which Austria could rebuild her forces. Although Marie Louise was not keen on marrying the man who had caused her family so much distress, she submitted without protest to her father’s wishes (see my post about Francis I).

On March 11, 1810, at the Augustinian church in Vienna, 18-year-old Marie Louise married 40-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte sight unseen. They literally did not see each other, since it was a marriage by proxy: Napoleon was in France and the bride’s uncle, Archduke Charles, stood in for the groom (see my post about the marriage of Napoleon and Marie Louise). Two days later, Marie Louise left for Paris.

What happened to Marie Louise from then on is an illustration of a very complex combination of love, duty, politics, and the passage of time. Read about the strange life of Napoleon's second wife at Shannon Selin's blog. -via Strange Company

When you know your death will be widely publicized due to your wealth or notoriety, it can be very tempting to fashion the story of your legacy to ensure people would still be talking about it a century (or more) later. In some cases, it was a joke. In other cases, it was just something weird that we still read about.  

An eighth of a million dollars ain't what it used to be, but even back then it probably wasn't all that much when you're raising nine kids. Read more of the weirdest sendoffs and bequests at Cracked.

At its height, the British Empire offered many foreign places for an English family to live, temporarily or permanently. Employees of the British government or the many companies that did business overseas were stationed in faraway places and raised families there. Labor was cheap in Asia, especially female labor, and these families procured ayahs, or nannies, for their children. These ayahs were expected to be completely devoted to the children they were hired to raise, even while the family traveled, often leaving their own children to do so.

Between the late 1700s and mid-1900s, countless ayahs traveled under the employment of British families. Maritime voyages were long and arduous, marked by bouts of seasickness and dangerous storms. The ayahs relieved memsahibs of their childcare duties by tending to their young and often anxious charges, and keeping them entertained for hours, day after day. Upon disembarking in London or other port cities, however, their services no longer required, a number of the ayahs were unceremoniously discharged. There are no records documenting how many ayahs found themselves in this position, or how most of them fared.

Many of these stranded ayahs, from India, Hong Kong, Burma, Malaysia, and other countrie, found their way to the Ayah's Home in London, run by the London City Mission. Established in 1825, the Ayah's home took in woman of many different backgrounds and religions whose stories are lost to time. Read about the Ayah's Home, and what little we know about the women who lived there, at Atlas Obscura.

A mule is a not a species, but a hybrid of a horse and a donkey. Mules don’t reproduce because horses and donkeys have different numbers of chromosomes, but that doesn’t really tell us much. SciShow explains why those chromosomes can pair up for one generation, but not two. Still, while mules are at a disadvantage in producing their own genetic descendants, they make pretty good surrogate mothers.

There are many ways that the intersection of poverty and childcare end in tragedy. Before state-run orphanages and foster care, before licensed daycare centers, there were baby farms, a profit-making industry that preyed on poor mothers.

In an era when the most prevalent form of contraception was abortion, for working-class Victorian women who found themselves unable to care for a child, a less dangerous alternative was to surrender their newborn or, “put them out to nurse” at baby farms for a small weekly fee. Most women who chose this route assumed that their child would be properly cared for and receive a wet nurse, attention, room and board at the very least. After all, as referenced heavily in the writings of Jane Austen, wealthier women were also known to put their infants in the care of wet nurses – women who were not the childrens’ biological mothers, but who would breastfeed the children. The fictional character Grenouille of Perfume, as well as the titular character of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist were both residents of baby farms.

Behind the scenes, there were plenty of practices that boosted profits, like taking in way too many babies and neglecting to feed them. But even worse was the trend to take a one-time fee from the relinquishing mother, which relieved the entrepreneur of the necessity of keeping the child alive at all. Read about the gruesome era of baby farms at Messy Messy Chic.

Some people see new technology and can't wait to get their hands on it, no matter what it does. Others see it as useful or not, and nothing more. Then there are those who consider the possible implications of a new gadget or app before deciding whether to adopt it. Kaiwei Tang was confronted by these different philosophies when we joined a startup class focusing on creating new tech.

Given his experience designing phones for Motorola, Nokia and Blackberry, Tang was more than qualified. Yet he thought about technology differently from his teachers and peers. For them, he says, success was about users spending more and more time on their phones, engrossed in the founders’ new apps. But to Tang, who describes apps and phones as ‘tools’, this sounded perverse. Would the maker of a hammer boast about how long his customers spent using it?

By now, Tang’s gripe is solidly mainstream: millions of people feel (and are) addicted to their phones and social media. We worry about checking email during family dinners or about the fact that we spend more time documenting vacations on Instagram than enjoying them. Unlike most of us, though, Tang was in a position to do something about it. He co-founded a company, raised millions of dollars, and released a new product: the Light Phone.

The Light Phone made phone calls. That was it. It couldn’t even text. It was the phone you bought because you wanted to stare at the clouds or notice the flowers blooming when you walked to work. Tang’s target customers were desk workers who downloaded meditation apps and people who paid for digital-detox camps. But other people wanted the Light Phone, too. Tang found himself speaking with parents who sought a stripped-down phone for their young teens – and, in a development that surprised him, members of ultra-Orthodox Jewish families.

To understand this attitude, Alex Mayyasi looks at the tech philosophy of the Amish, who aren't necessarily anti-tech, but who carefully consider the pros and cons of new technology. -via Damn Interesting