Pharmacies of the 19th century claimed to have all the answers to your every particular ailment—but, in fact, their remedies turn out being far from scientific. We look back on 15 curious quack remedies from the age of patent medicine.

Pharmacies of the 19th century claimed to have all the answers to your every particular ailment—but, in fact, their remedies turn out being far from scientific. We look back on 15 curious quack remedies from the age of patent medicine.

Ancient Peruvians were the first in the world to dye fabric blue, beating the Egyptians to it by 1600 years.

Brits and Americans Have Totally Different Ideas of What ‘Frown’ Means
What is a frown? A look of displeasure, made with the eyebrows? Or a sad face, made with downturned mouth?

Selfies Can Calculate the Monetary Value of Conservation, Study Finds
A new study finds that conserved lands contributed around $1.8 billion to Vermont's tourism industry between 2007 and 2014.

15 Nervy Facts About the Spinal Cord
8. It stops growing once you turn five.

Escaping your parents’ home doesn’t seem to have quite the same urgency it once did. According to Time, recent Census data indicates that a substantial number of Millennials—typically considered to be those 18 to 34 years of age—are choosing to remain in their childhood residences, with one state in particular crowding out the rest.
The winner? New Jersey, which has just under 47 percent of that demographic living at home. Eastern state neighbors New York and Connecticut each have roughly 40 percent choosing to stay in the nest, a significant spike from the national average of around 33 percent. That’s up from 23 percent in 2000. (The state with the lowest percentage of Millennials rooming with their ‘rents? North Dakota, with just 14.1 percent.)
It can be difficult to extrapolate why some states have more clingy kids than others. The price of real estate might be one explanation (rent is much more expensive in New Jersey and New York than it is out West); the trend of Millennials getting married later in life might be another. Without the need for their own mortgage, utility bills, and consumer spending, it’s possible that the homebodies may even be contributing to an economic downturn.
Then again, who can resist free laundry? “There’s the comfort of someone to help you out at all times,” college student Irsia Khan told USAToday.com in June 2016. “Having your meals ready and your laundry done for you takes the load off on the rest of the things you go through in college.”
[h/t Time]
September 16, 2016 – 11:00am
After its fearless second season, which tackled everything from racial slurs to police brutality, black-ish isn’t just a critically-adored comedy. It’s now been branded a socially important sitcom, echoing the work of Good Times, A Different World, and other groundbreaking series before it. So how did black-ish land in this spot after just two years on the air? It’s all thanks to one highly personal showrunner, Larry Wilmore, and cast members who are and are not related to the former lead singer of The Supremes. Find out more about the show—which will debut its third season on September 21, just a few days after making a run at three Emmy Awards—below.
When black-ish debuted in 2014, there was a big discussion about its title and what it meant. Show creator Kenya Barris told NPR that it’s a reflection of his anxieties about raising his children in a more privileged world than he knew as a kid. “I wanted to be honest with what it’s like sort of raising your kids in a different environment than you were accustomed to being raised in,” he explained. “My kids are nothing like I remember black kids being when I was a kid.”
When Laurence Fishburne was asked about the show’s title on The View, his explanation was more blunt: “For some people, it means when black folks kind of act white. For some people, it means when white folks kind of act black. I think of it this way. Two words: Justin Bieber. Justin Bieber acts blackish but he doesn’t get shot by the police; he gets a police escort home.”
Barris has repeatedly cited Norman Lear as a primary influence on the show. Lear developed and created groundbreaking sitcoms like All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Maude, and Good Times. Barris is such a fan of Good Times in particular that he turned the black-ish season two finale into a homage. “He’s beyond an influence for me,” Barris told Variety. “I feel like I am so derivative of Norman Lear and what he was doing and what he was about. It’s hard to even think about being a writer without him having been there.”
Lear clearly admires Barris’s work, too. He stopped by the black-ish writers room earlier this year to pitch a few ideas, one of which ended up in the season two episode “The Johnson Show.”

Barris has always described the show as semi-autobiographical, but some of the parallels between the Johnsons and Barris’s own family are much more direct. For instance, the black-ish matriarch Rainbow Johnson is an anesthesiologist with a black mother and a white father. Barris’s real-life wife is also a biracial anesthesiologist named Rainbow.
Many episodes are based on real conversations with Barris’s kids, too. The series received wide critical praise for the season two episode “Hope,” which discussed police brutality. It opens with one of the youngest Johnsons, Jack, staring at news footage and asking his parents, “Why are all these people so mad?” Barris’s then seven-year-old son asked him the exact same question when his family watched the Ferguson grand jury decline to indict a police officer for shooting a black teenager in 2014. Barris got the idea for the black-ish season two premiere after seeing some of his daughter’s texts.
After graduating from Clark Atlanta University with a film degree, Barris picked up a few writing credits on the Showtime series Soul Food and WB sitcom Like Family. But he was hungry to develop his own show, so he worked with his childhood friend Tyra Banks on a reality competition pitch. That series was America’s Next Top Model, and Barris got a handsome cut of the profits as a co-creator of the series.

The star of the recently-departed Nightly Show was originally set to run black-ish with Barris. ABC had proposed Larry Wilmore as a co-showrunner in 2014 and, given Wilmore’s work on In Living Color and The Bernie Mac Show, Barris was eager to partner with him. But then Comedy Central offered Wilmore his own talk show, and he had to exit. He still stayed on for the first 12 episodes of black-ish, but Barris called in TV veteran Jonathan Groff (the producer, not the Glee and Hamilton actor) as back-up. Groff has been an executive producer ever since.
Yes, the Johnson twins—Jack and Diane—are actually named for John Cougar Mellencamp’s 1982 ditty about “two American kids doing the best they can.” The song is apparently one of Barris’s favorites.
As a star and executive producer on black-ish, Anthony Anderson has contributed some of his own real-life experiences to the show. One of them? The “bro mitzvah” that Dre throws for his eldest son in the pilot. Anderson hosted a similar bash for his own son.
You might’ve noticed a moment in the middle of all that bro mitzvah revelry when Dre goes for a backflip on the dance floor … and lands flat on his back. According to Marcus Scribner, who plays Andre Jr., that move was not scripted—Anderson actually wiped out. “I think that everybody in the entire room thought Anthony died,” Scribner said in an interview with J-14. “We all rushed over to Anthony like, ‘Are you okay? Are you okay?’ He just kept it moving and it made it … into the show.”
Tracee Ellis Ross is the second oldest child of Diana Ross, which means she grew up in a household where Michael Jackson called frequently and Andy Warhol painted her portrait. (She recaps both of those stories in the clip above.) Diana is also incredibly proud of her comedienne daughter. When Tracee was nominated for an Emmy this year, Diana took out a full-page ad in The Hollywood Reporter congratulating her daughter on the success.
But Ross isn’t the only black-ish cast member with celebrity kin. Yara Shahidi, who plays Zoey, boasts Nas as a second cousin. She was even the flower girl at his wedding.
When pressed for some behind-the-scenes stories, Shahidi told Essence that the black-ish actors frequently challenge each other to dance-offs. “Anthony can break it down,” she said. “He can do salsa, he can do the worm, he knows ballet. It’s pretty trippy.” But he presumably has some stiff competition from his youngest onscreen son. Miles Brown, who plays Jack, made a name for himself when he was just four years old as the dance sensation Baby Boogaloo. Here he is on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
September 16, 2016 – 10:00am
In 1975, Nevada made a strange addition to its voting ballots: Underneath the names of all the politicians running for office, voters were given the opportunity to officially cast a vote for no one.
Atlas Obscura reports that the “none of these candidates” option, which still appears on ballots to this day, was created in an attempt to encourage people to vote. Officials believed that by giving voters a way to voice their dissent on the ballot itself, they could inspire more people to show up at their polling station. Unfortunately, the initiative didn’t work as planned: Despite the opportunity to officially stick it to unlikable candidates, voter turnout has continued to decline.
The “none of these candidates” option, however, has been a consistently popular candidate. Not only does it appear on every ballot, but it has even “won” a few elections. In 2014, for instance, “none of these candidates” beat out all eight of the Democratic governor candidates in Nevada, winning a full 30 percent of the vote. Not bad for a candidate who doesn’t exist.
[h/t Atlas Obscura]
Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.
September 16, 2016 – 9:30am
Jimsideas via Flickr // CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Lombard Street in San Francisco is laid out like a driver’s worst nightmare, but that hasn’t stopped fleets of tourists from lining up to conquer it. Each year, about 2 million visitors head to the sloped road to experience its zig-zagging trajectory, annoying local residents in the process. The traffic has gotten so out of hand that San Francisco is considering imposing a toll and a reservation policy on the famed roadway, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Those are two potential solutions to Lombard’s congestion problem currently on the radar of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority. The department has launched a study looking into ways to reduce disruptive visits to the attraction. Other strategies include offering discounted cable car fares to the site to discourage driving and closing the block to nonresident pedestrians and vehicles.
The commotion on Lombard Street isn’t a new issue for the Russian Hill neighborhood. Locals are used to dealing with litter, vandalism, and car break-ins on a regular basis. In one recent case, a resident had to use a golf club to chase two men off his roof.
The city has experimented with solutions before, like employing traffic ambassadors and briefly banning cars from the area in 2014. So far, nothing seems to have changed the situation for the better, but an admission fee may provide the neighborhood some relief.
[h/t San Francisco Chronicle]
Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.
September 16, 2016 – 9:00am