Have you ever read a Cracked.com article? It’s a website with clickbait-y titles (6 Animals That Are Secret Badasses! 5 Ways College Makes You Dumber!) with pretty substantial content. It’s been around forever. I’ve been reading it for 7 or 8 years and it’s definitely older than that. If you’re familiar with it, do you like it? If so, good news, this is basically 200 or so pages of Cracked articles. Your mileage with that, I guess, depends entirely on whether you enjoy Cracked.com.
The De-Textbook covers a lot of ground while keeping pretty decently to a unifying theme of “things you learned in school that weren’t entirely true,” as the title implies. It’s not a book that will change your life (I mean, I assume – I don’t know your life) but it has some interesting little nuggets, such as –
- Abraham Lincoln was a brawler
- 96% of people involved in plane crashes survive
- People who get regular wellness exams tend to ignore problems and have worse outcomes
- The overwhelming majority of suicides are completed on a whim that in fact would have passed (the methods that determined this were really interesting and the results were I guess good but really frustrating)
- We are more likely to empathize with pain experienced by someone with purple skin than we are someone with a “real” skin color other than ours
- People are getting drastically smarter
- Lyndon B. Johnson loved to show people his, uh, johnson
- Vikings did not wear those hats
- Lemmings don’t commit suicide, ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand, and chameleons don’t camouflage themselves
- Your whole life is a lie
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
