Adolf Hitler was rightly vilified for his atrocious practice of eugenics, which was a euphemism for mass murder. But it’s amazing how many widely admired people have held similar views of cleansing the undesirables from the human race. Most of them didn’t suggest the use of gas chambers, but their recommendations weren’t exactly humane.

10Helen Keller

As we all know, a childhood illness left Helen Keller blind and deaf in the late 1800s. Without the help of a determined young teacher named Anne Sullivan, she might have been institutionalized.

Keller was a lifelong advocate for the blind and the deaf. Less well known are her strong political views, resulting in FBI surveillance of her for a good portion of her life. She joined the Socialist party in the early 1900s, believed in women’s rights and birth control, supported the NAACP, and helped found the American Civil Liberties Union. The Helen Keller Services for the Blind helps blind and deaf people get educations and jobs.

In her own life, Keller also wanted love. Although she never married, she was once engaged to a man named Peter Fagan. Both Keller’s mother and Anne Sullivan were against the marriage. Supposedly, they believed that Keller wouldn’t be able to take care of a family with her disabilities. At first, Fagan wouldn’t allow Keller to be influenced by her family, but they eventually scared him off.

Keller had a warm, lifelong friendship with Alexander Graham Bell, whose views on eugenics we’ve already discussed. Keller believed in eugenics as well. In her case, it involved people with mental disabilities. When baby John Bollinger was born with various deformities in 1915, surgeon Harry Haiselden refused to operate to save the boy’s life. Instead, he told the boy’s parents that their “defective” child should be allowed to die, saying the infant would “be an imbecile and possibly criminal.” In some cases, Haiselden actively ended the lives of disabled infants. He trumpeted his views, even making a movie (starring himself) to publicize them.

The Chicago Medical Society kicked him out of their organization. Keller expressed her views in a 1915 letter to The New Republic:

“It seems to me that the simplest, wisest thing to do would be to submit cases like that of the malformed idiot baby to a jury of expert physicians. An ordinary jury decides matters of life and death on the evidence of untrained and often prejudiced observers . . . Even if the accused before them is guilty, there is often no way of knowing that . . . He would not become a useful and productive member of society. A mental defective, on the other hand, is almost sure to be a potential criminal. The evidence before a jury of physicians considering the case of an idiot would be exact and scientific. Their findings would be free from the prejudice and inaccuracy of untrained observation. They would act only in cases of true idiocy, where there could be no hope of mental development . . . We must decide between a fine humanity like Dr. Haiselden’s and a cowardly sentimentalism.”

9Theodore Roosevelt

Widely admired during his lifetime, US president Teddy Roosevelt is still highly regarded by many people today. He was the “trust buster,” the man who gave us a “Square Deal,” the conservationist who created the US Forest Service and the National Wildlife Refuge System, and the first American winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906.

He even had the teddy bear named after him because he wouldn’t shoot an old bear after it was tied to a tree. He thought that was unsportsmanlike. But he had no such reservations about eugenics. In a January 3, 1913, letter to Charles Davenport of the Eugenics Record Office, Roosevelt compared human reproduction to stock breeding:

“Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding . . . We fail to understand that such conduct is rational compared to the conduct of a nation which permits unlimited breeding from the worst stocks, physically and morally . . . Some day we will realize that the prime duty—the inescapable duty—of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.”

Many people associated with the eugenics movement wanted to do away with physically weak individuals. Roosevelt agreed with that in his letter. Yet, he himself was plagued by physical weakness his entire life, even though he promoted an image of being physically robust. He was a sickly child, with severe asthma and myopia. He also had heart problems, became blind in his left eye from a boxing match, and lost the hearing in his left ear.

8Sir Winston Churchill

In 2002, Sir Winston Churchill was voted the greatest Briton of all time by the British public. He was often a polarizing figure, but as one writer put it, “He got the big issues right.”

He was more than just a skilled orator. When almost no one in the US or UK wanted to acknowledge what was happening in Germany under Hitler, Churchill traveled there to get a firsthand look. “It’s an illusion to think he was just a rhetorician, a man who skated over the issues,” said Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London. “He was deeply immersed in all the detail, and all the technicalities. And that helped him to get the right answer.” Churchill also won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his historical works.

Nevertheless, the man who fought Hitler had something in common with him: the belief that eugenics was vital to preserving the purity of a self-defined superior race. “The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate,” wrote Churchill in a 1910 letter to British prime minister Herbert Asquith.

The Mental Deficiency Act 1913 defined the “mental defectives” who could be put away indefinitely. “Idiots” were so mentally deficient that they couldn’t protect themselves against ordinary physical dangers. “Imbeciles” couldn’t manage their own affairs, although they weren’t as bad as idiots. The “feeble-minded” were better than idiots or imbeciles, but they needed supervision, control, and care to protect others or themselves. A “moral defective” had a permanent mental weakness along with criminal tendencies that couldn’t be controlled with punishment. With minor adjustments, the same definitions applied to children.

Although Churchill didn’t advocate the use of gas chambers, he did believe in the segregation, confinement, and sterilization of these inferior people.

7Linus Pauling

Linus Pauling was a scientist and peace advocate who was so widely admired that he’s the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes. The first was for chemistry, and the second was for peace. In all his pursuits, he appeared to have an overriding philosophy to minimize human suffering. He was dedicated to banning the testing of nuclear weapons, arguing that the nuclear fallout was dangerous to human health. Although he was sometimes a controversial figure, he was a tireless advocate for world peace.

He also made a lot of contributions to science, including the observation that sickle-cell anemia was caused by a genetic mutation that deformed the hemoglobin of a blood cell. It was the first time a “molecular disease” had been identified.

Then he combined eugenics with his findings. To reduce human suffering, he believed it was necessary to legally intervene to wipe out the factors that caused genetic diseases. With sickle-cell anemia, he suggested that African Americans be legally required to get tested for the disease. The next step would be to restrict marriage and reproduction for carriers of the disease. He felt that carriers of other genetic diseases, such as fibrocystic disease and phenylketonuria, should be treated the same way.

A few years later, Pauling recommended even more extreme measures to minimize suffering from these diseases. He recommended that carriers have a tattoo or other prominent mark placed on their bodies, perhaps on their foreheads, to identify them. In that way, he figured that carriers of the same disease could avoid getting married. He also felt that if a female carrier became pregnant by a male carrier, the baby should be aborted to reduce the child’s suffering in a preventative manner. He believed that abortion caused less suffering than a hereditary disease.

However, Pauling did not advocate killing a child who had already been born with such a disease. Nor did he believe in forced castration or sterilization.

6Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

As an associate justice of the US Supreme Court for 30 years, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was considered one of the most brilliant jurists of all time. His effect on the law is still felt today, 90 years after his death. Appointed to the court in 1902 by President Teddy Roosevelt, Holmes became known as “The Great Dissenter” because of the supposed wisdom of his dissenting opinions.

Although Holmes was widely admired during his lifetime, there remains at least one dark stain on his career: the 1927 majority opinion he wrote in Buck v. Bell, regarding forced sterilization in the US for undesirables. Using eugenics as the basis for a diagnosis, Charlottesville resident Carrie Buck was deemed unfit to have more children after she became an unwed mother at 17 years old from a rape. It’s believed that her mother was put in a state institution because she was deemed promiscuous, even though she was raped. To make a stronger case to sterilize Carrie, her six-month-old daughter was diagnosed as “abnormal.”

Holmes wrote that Carrie was the “probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted.” He went on to say that “her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization.”

Holmes also gave the Nazis a line of defense at Nuremberg. To justify their atrocious acts, the Nazis quoted this passage from Holmes’s decision: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

That decision paved the way for thousands of women to be forcibly sterilized in the US by upholding Virginia’s sterilization law.

5John Maynard Keynes

In the early 1900s, John Maynard Keynes was considered one of the world’s leading economists. He wrote The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which looked at how the overall economy performed rather than breaking it down into separate markets. That approach became known as macroeconomics, a branch of study that has been putting students to sleep for almost a century.

At that time, Western governments routinely balanced their budgets. Keynes’s approach was novel because he recommended that governments run deficits when economic growth slows to keep people working. He wanted governments to spend more than they took in during recessions (and then reverse this policy once the economy could bear it).

As a last resort during the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried Keynesian economics to stimulate the US economy. “I came to the conclusion that the present-day problem calls for action both by the Government and by the people, that we suffer primarily from a failure of consumer demand because of [a] lack of buying power,” said Roosevelt in an address to the American people. “Therefore it is up to us to create an economic upturn.”

Keynes got credit for reviving the struggling US economy, making him an economic hero. Others dispute whether Roosevelt’s plan really helped at all. Nevertheless, US fiscal policy was based on Keynesian economics until the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan used monetary policy to fight rampant inflation.

Keynes also believed in macromanaging the population through eugenics. In his book The Essential Keynes, he wrote: “The time has already come when each country needs a considered national policy about what size of population, whether larger or smaller than at present or the same, is most expedient. And having settled this policy, we must take steps to carry it into operation. The time may arrive a little later when the community as a whole must pay attention to the innate quality as well as to the mere numbers of its future members.”

As director of the Eugenics Society for about seven years, Keynes believed contraception was necessary to limit the growth of the lower classes because they were too “drunken and ignorant” to do it themselves.

4Edward Franklin Frazier

Edward Franklin Frazier was considered the most important African-American sociologist in the 1900s. Like many of his contemporaries who analyzed the black community, he was a controversial figure. Eventually, he was named the chair of Howard University’s sociology department.

In one of his more contentious findings, he said that African Americans no longer had a link to their African heritage. He believed that they were now culturally American. He was particularly critical of African Americans who saw themselves as middle-class. He thought that they exhibited cultural elitism and led their lives solely for the acquisition of material goods.

Frazier didn’t support the white eugenics model of Nordic superiority, but he did apply a version of eugenics based on class and geography to the black community. In Eugenics and the Race Problem, he wrote, “There is no apparent danger that the best mentally endowed Negroes will debase their intellectual inheritance by mating with feebleminded persons. But there is a danger that the proper institutional controls, which should control the procreation of the colored feebleminded, will be lacking among colored people. In the South where little notice is taken of the colored feebleminded, they are permitted to breed at a rapid rate.”

Frazier believed that black Southerners have undesirable traits that are linked to unregulated reproduction, while the desirable black Northerners, whom he saw as high achievers, got that way through a “socializing process.” He seemed to believe that the environment in the North creates its own natural selection of the best and the brightest. But his references to controlling reproduction in segments of the black population to better the race is typical eugenics language.

3William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt “W.E.B.” Du Bois was a complicated figure in African-American culture. He often clashed with other black leaders, but his influence was undeniable for many years.

Born in 1868 just after the Civil War, he was the first African American to get a doctorate in history from Harvard University. Shortly afterward, he began to publish insightful papers on the American black community, for which he gained recognition as the first serious scholar of black life in the US.

With his combative approach to fighting racism, Du Bois clashed with the more conservative Booker T. Washington, the most distinguished African-American leader at that time. This caused a rift in the black community, as people chose which type of leadership they wanted.

Du Bois cofounded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where he edited its monthly magazine, The Crisis. In 1934, Du Bois left the organization in a feud with Walter White, the leader of the NAACP, over the issue of voluntary segregation of the black community. The NAACP preferred to fight for integration, while Du Bois thought the correct course was segregation.

Given his passionate fight for equality, it’s rather surprising that Du Bois believed in eugenics. He didn’t agree with the Nordic eugenics movement, but he did advocate a eugenics approach to the black family. He divided the black community into four groups—from the desirable “Talented Tenth,” whom he saw as educated leaders, to the undesirable “submerged tenth,” whom he described as prostitutes, criminals, and loafers.

Du Bois wanted to promote marriage and reproduction within the Talented Tenth and breed out the submerged tenth. In the Birth Control Review, he said, “The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that part of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly.”

2Woodrow Wilson

For over 50 years, Woodrow Wilson has been ranked as one of the top 10 US presidents. According to Franklin D. Roosevelt, “All our great presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” He felt that Wilson was a moral leader who used his position as president to persuade the public and the legislature that he was leading the nation down the right path.

As the 28th US president, Wilson was the nation’s commander-in-chief during World War I. He received a Nobel Peace Prize after the war for negotiating a peace treaty that called for the establishment of the League of Nations, an organization meant to avoid future wars by arbitrating disputes between countries.

Wilson established the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve, getting labor reforms (such as child labor laws) passed and pushing Congress to give women the right to vote. “I do not believe,” said Wilson, “that any man can lead who does not act . . . Under the impulse of a profound sympathy with those whom he leads—a sympathy which is insight—an insight which is of the heart rather than of the intellect.”

His words seem to be at odds with his actions as governor of New Jersey in 1911, when he signed New Jersey’s sterilization bill into law. It was “an act to authorize and provide for the sterilization of feeble-minded (including idiots, imbeciles and morons), epileptics, rapists, certain criminals and other defectives.” It goes on to say that heredity is largely responsible for these “defects,” which was the reason for sterilization without consent.

Wilson suffered a massive stroke in 1919 while he was president. He was paralyzed on his left side, and his vision was impaired. He was confined to bed for 17 months, and his wife and doctor tried to hide his condition. As a result, Mrs. Wilson is considered by some people to be the country’s first female president. But it does raise the question of whether Woodrow Wilson would have been eliminated under some eugenics programs.

1Clarence Darrow

The words of famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow were often poetic, appealing for compassion and tolerance for those who fell short of society’s standards. “I am pleading for the future,” he once said. “I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men. When we can learn by reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.”

By the early 1900s, Darrow was known as the “Attorney for the Damned,” a tip of the hat to his mythical image of always defending the underdogs of society. The man didn’t measure up to the myth.

When Darrow argued that all life was worth saving, he was referring to recent college graduates Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who had killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks to see if they could commit the perfect crime. According to Darrow, the defendants’ actions were determined by their parents, their wealth, their youth, detective novels, and anything else he could think to blame. As he explained, Leopold and Loeb didn’t kill Franks because they felt any negative emotions toward him. They killed for the experience, like killing a spider.

Darrow has been especially praised for his 1926 article in The American Mercury, in which he argued vehemently against sterilization and the banning of intermarriages for the purpose of eugenics. He even felt that we should keep “morons, idiots, and imbeciles” because we need them to do manual labor for the intelligentsia.

Yet, Darrow displayed a cold cruelty toward disabled children. Ever the champion of the underdog, Darrow went on record as agreeing with Haiselden, the Chicago surgeon Helen Keller had written in response to. “Chloroform unfit children,” Darrow said. “Show them the same mercy that is shown beasts that are no longer fit to live.”

Once in a while comes a TV series which outlives itself from being just a mere programme, it becomes a worldwide phenomenon. There have been TV shows which have found success in many countries in their national versions. Let’s take a look into 10 most widely adapted TV shows around the world.

Top 10 Most Widely Adapted TV Shows:

10. The Amazing Race

A one of a kind reality TV show, ‘The Amazing Race’ was first tested in the USA and soon found huge success, having premiered in 2001, it so far has completed 24 season with the 25th season going on air right now. The show puts 10-12 teams of two in a race around the world, where they travel to various countries to complete indigenous task.

The Show’s popularity is evident from the fact that it has been adapted into nine national and three continental versions. The US version has also been hugely praised by critics, winning 13 Emmys out of 65 nominations.

9. The Apprentice

‘The Apprentice’ was one of the first reality TV show to give contestants an opportunity to build a successful career in corporate world. In the show, 16 contestants fight each other in various tasks related to corporate world to get hired by a business tycoon like Donal Trump, Martha Steward, Tony Fernandes, Robert Justus, Tuncay Özilhan, etc. First aired in the US in 2004 13 seasons with Donald Trump and 1 season with Martha Steward, the show was immediately picked up for 20 national and 3 continental versions.

8. Popstars

One of the earliest talent hunt TV show which inspired innumerable singing reality TV shows is ‘Popstars’. Airing for the first time in New Zealand in 1999, the show is about individual contestants singing their hearts out to become part of a new singing band/group.

The show was adapted by 38 countries, creating bands such as L5, Viva, EyeQ, Bro’Sis, TrueBliss, Excellence, among others. The show served as the source of inspiration for many reality shows that came after it which ruled the TV industry.

7. MasterChef

One of the biggest cooking show, ‘Masterchef’ provided contestants the opportunity to start their culinary career in the most lavish and grandest possible way one can imagine. The original version, which started in the UK in 1990 was more of a game show rather than a reality show. It ran till 2001. The show was revived in 2005 by UK and subsequently adapted by more than 42 countries and generating one pan-regional version.

6. Fear Factor

‘Fear Factor’ brought something to the viewers, which they have never heard or seen before. Challenging people to face their fears, this show gained immense popularity throughout the years. The show aired for the first time in USA in 2001, and since then has been adapted into national versions by more than 35 countries.

Although different versions of the show have different formats, but the show basically involves contestants performing various stunts to win prize money Stunts include collecting flags while hanging from rooftop, walking on broken glass with bare feet, immersing one’s head or entire body in rats, spiders, snakes or making one’s car topple over a ramp, etc.

5. Got Talent Series

‘Got Talent’ series is a reality TV show which can be called the mother of all talent hunt shows, because it gives singers, dancers, magicians, stunt performers, painters, etc.; an opportunity to showcase their talent and win prize money.

The first ‘Got Talent’ series was held in U.S. under the name ‘America’s Got Talent’ in 2006. IT has so far completed 9 seasons there and has been adapted by more than 51 countries.

4. Top Model Series

One of the original fashion themed reality TV shows which brought out fashion industry’s work ethics to people’s eyes was the ‘Top Model’ series. Airing first in U.S as ‘America’s Next Top Model’ in 2003, the show has been picked up for more than 40 national and more than 5 pan-regional versions.

The premise of the show involves around 10-16 contestants who fight it out in various modelling challenges, photo-shoots and ramp-walks to launch their career in the modelling world to become a top model.

3. Idol Series

Perhaps the most popular singing reality show of all-time, ‘Idol’ series has its fair share of success worldwide. The show is about several contestants singing it out to become the idol and thus become the next big music sensation. The first version of the show aired in the U.K. under the name ‘Pop Idol’. Soon the concept spread to more than 41 countries.

It even spawned 6 multi-national versions. It has given the music world some of its current favourite stars in Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Abhijeet Sawant, Phillip Phillips, Guy Sebastian, Will Young, Carly Rae Jepsen, Ricki-Lee Dawn Coulter, etc.

2. Big Brother

One of most unique themed reality TV shows, which gave the birth of countless spin-offs globally is ‘Big Brother’. Originally airing in 1999 in Netherlands, the series now has 52 different worldwide versions. The format of the show is something like this – a group of contestants (in some versions, celebrity contestants are used) are locked inside a house with a garden and swimming pool and are stripped of any outside mode of communication like internet, newspaper, telephone, television, radio, etc.

Each week, they nominate among themselves to vote someone out and the persons with most nominations are voted out by public vote, until only one remains.

1. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire

This is the show which gave common people the chance to dream and hope to become a millionaire. The show, in which contestants have to answer a series of questions to become a millionaire, has been extremely popular with both critics and public alike. The first version was seen in Britain in 1998, and it now has been adapted by more than 35 countries. It allowed ordinary people to dare to dream.

Nearly everyone has had the experience of going to a movie with their friends, only to leave the theater and debate their interpretations of the ending. Well, it turns out that there are certain movies that people get wrong all the time. Here on Listorati, we’ve gathered 10 such films to talk about how you may or may not have been getting them wrong all along.

Keep in mind, some of these reveal spoilers for the end of a film, which is why we’ve chosen titles that have been out for several years…

10. (500) Days of Summer

In 2009, the romantic comedy (500) Days of Summer premiered in theaters. Many people related to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s heartbroken character, Tom, and bashed Zooey Deschanel’s character Summer for being a villain who put him in the friend zone, despite being such a “great” guy. However, the film was meant to make the viewer examine their own behavior in past relationships, because everyone paints themselves as the victim after a breakup.

Throughout the entire movie, Summer makes it very clear to Tom that she is not looking for a romantic relationship. Despite her honesty about the emotional wall she put between them, Tom continued to believe that she was “the one,” and pushed his expectations on her. When she didn’t reciprocate those feelings, he felt betrayed. He fell in love with the idea of Summer, rather than listening and paying attention to the reality of the situation. During a 2019 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel revisited the film for its 10-year anniversary. Gordon-Levitt said, “I think a really fun thing to do is try to watch it and just put yourself in Summer’s shoes the whole time.”

9. Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane is considered one of the greatest movies of all-time. Every single film student in the world has been forced to sit through this masterpiece by Orson Welles and analyze the deeper meaning. However, if you’re watching it as a casual viewer at home, it may be easy to misinterpret what’s really going on. In the film, we watch a man named Charles Foster Kane rise from poverty to become a millionaire. His dying word was “Rosebud,” and the journalists in the film go crazy trying to figure out what “Rosebud” actually is.

Donald Trump claimed that Citizen Kane was his favorite movie, and during an interview, he was asked to analyze Rosebud. He said, “A lot of people don’t understand the significance of it. I’m not sure if anyone understands the significance. But I think it means bringing a lonely, sad figure back into his childhood.” Throughout the rest of the interview, Trump describes Kane’s misfortune as a “modest fall,” and he said that character needed to get “a different woman” if he wanted to be happy.

Well… Trump was at least halfway right. At the very end of the film, we see the camera pan over all of Kane’s treasures, and it stops on his beloved childhood sled, “Rosebud.” Earlier in the movie, we see that he was playing in the snow with this sled during his last moments of childhood innocence. Basically, he spends the rest of the movie acquiring wealth, but he will never be as happy as he was as that care-free kid sledding in the snow.

8. The Shining

The Shining is one of the most famous horror movies of all time. But the author of the book, Stephen King, is famously frustrated that the director, Stanley Kubrick, was the one to completely miss the point of his story. The plot surrounds the Torrance family, who are spending the winter in a haunted mountain resort called the Overlook Hotel. In the beginning of the movie, Jack Torrance has been sober, and the hauntings do not begin until he starts indulging at the hotel bar.

In the movie, there is a scene where Jack is reading an issue of Playgirl magazine, which is full of pictures of nude men. Internet sleuths did some digging, and realized that that specific issue had an article about incest. There are several other clues in the movie that suggest that Danny Torrance was being sexually abused by his alcoholic father, which could explain the young boy’s deteriorating mental state. Combined with Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of the character, this made Jack Torrance crazy from the very start, and it’s possible to interpret the movie as being about mental illness, instead of a haunting. In the book, Jack Torrance is a good father who is struggling with his addiction, and their family tries to keep it together in the midst of a very real supernatural experience.

King notoriously disliked Stanley Kubrick’s movie version of The Shining so much that he made his own version in a TV miniseries. During an interview with The Guardian, King explains that The Shining was one of his favorite books, and the characters stuck with him for years. He decided to write a sequel called Dr. Sleep. Danny Torrance is all grown up, but he is obviously traumatized from the events of the Overlook Hotel. He inherits his father’s alcoholism, but is managing it by going to AA. We learn that he does, in fact, have psychic abilities. There will be a movie version of Dr. Sleep coming in 2019, starring Ewan McGregor as Danny Torrance.

7. American Psycho

After American Psycho premiered in theaters, it was bashed for glorifying toxic masculinity and violence. It was even protested by the National Organization of Women, who demanded a boycott. But in reality, it was directed by a woman named Mary Herron, and it was meant to do the complete opposite of what everyone assumed.

As a dark comedy, we are meant to see how Christian Bale’s character Patrick Bateman is narcissistic and uncaring about other people. He also, incidentally, is a serial killer. Bateman admits that he is a murderer multiple times throughout the movie, but everyone around him is so self-absorbed that they aren’t even listening. According to the author of the novel, Bret Easton Ellis, “It was meant to be a critique of male behavior. A lot of people don’t realize that. They haven’t read the book.”

6. Donnie Darko

After Donnie Darko premiered in 2001, plenty of people felt their jaws drop by the end of the film. Fans cannot seem to decide if the character Donnie truly did send a plane engine traveling through time to save the world, or if he was simply mentally ill. Since he admits to having “emotional problems,” has visions of a giant rabbit, and frequently goes to therapy, the audience can believe either may be true. The writer and director, Richard Kelly, was just 26-years-old when he released Donnie Darko.

In 2017, he re-released a new Director’s Cut of the film so that he could go into more detail in order to answer the questions that fans had about the movie. He said, “I wanted to provide a bunch more information than was there. It’s a very dense, layered film, and there’s a much bigger world beyond the film.” So, if you’re still confused by the plot, you may just want to watch this new cut and commentary.

5. Shutter Island

Shutter Island is about a US Marshal named Teddy Daniels, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. He is investigating the Ashecliffe Mental Hospital on an island outside of Boston. But in the twist ending, he is told that he was actually a patient named Andrew Laeddis, who was serving time for killing his wife. His doctor was allowing Laeddis to live out his fantasy of being a US Marshal, hoping that bringing it to a conclusion would help snap him out of his dissociative identity disorder. By the end, he relapses, and must be lobotomized. But he says, “This place makes me wonder. Which would be worse – to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?”

This had audiences losing their own minds over the ending. If you were confused as to what really happened in the movie, don’t worry — you’re not alone. Even Leonardo Dicaprio told the director, Martin Scorsese, “I have no idea where I am or what I’m doing.’”

While DiCaprio and Scorsese refuse to reveal the meaning behind the quote, most agree that Andrew Laeddis actually was cured, but he simply could not live with the guilt of his true memories.

The screenwriter, Laeta Kalogridis, adapted the screenplay from the novel by Dennis Lehane. The story was so complex Kalogridis had to make a 40 to 50 page outline, which took her an entire year, before she actually wrote down any of the dialogue. Every time you watch the film over again from another perspective, you will pick up clues about the truth that you never saw before.

4. Total Recall

In the 1990 movie Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a man named Quaid who pays for a service called “Recall,” which promises to let anyone live through any fantasy scenario. He says that he wants to become a secret agent, but before the procedure finishes, he finds himself caught up in a series of strange events that lead him to the planet Mars.

At the end of the movie, we see him standing on Mars, looking out onto the horizon with his new lover. Fans of the film have debated over the years whether the events of the movie were actually happening, or if it was all part of the fantasy secret agent scenario he was paying for. According to the director, Paul Verhoeven, “Total Recall doesn’t say whether it’s reality or it is a dream. It’s really saying there’s this reality and there’s that reality, and both exist at the same time.” So, basically, everyone is right, and people can stop arguing over it.

3. Inception

The characters of the movie Inception enter dreams within dreams. They are on a mission to insert an idea into the subconscious of a powerful CEO. The only trouble was Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Cobb, was haunted by the memory of his wife, and she keeps trying to sabotage their mission. Each of the characters carry a totem with them to help them distinguish dreams from reality.

At the end of the movie, Cobb finds closure in his wife’s death, and he regains custody of his children. The camera focuses on Cobb’s totem, which is a spinning top. It looks as though it may topple at any second, signifying that he is in reality. But the movie ends before we learn if he is truly in a dream or not. Fans everywhere debated with one another over this scene. However, the true message behind the ending of Inception is that once Cobb has his kids, he chooses to make this his new reality. And, according to Christopher Nolan, he would rather the audience draw their own conclusions about what the ending really means.

2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a very trippy sci-fi romantic comedy. A couple named Clementine and Joel break up and choose to pay for a procedure that erases the memories of their relationship. It had many fans watching over and over again to try to see any hidden messages. Some people out there have a theory that Clementine and Joel have erased the memory of their relationship multiple times, and they are doomed to repeat this process forever. Since Clementine dyes her hair a lot, they theorize that each color represents a new timeline.

In reality, Clementine truly does change her hair color through the course of just one relationship. Each color represents the “season” of their love story — from green in the “spring” of new love, to blue of the icy cold “winter” of a breakup. The first time they got together, Joel was depressed, and expected Clementine to be his “manic pixie dream girl” who was going to solve all of his problems and make him a happier person. When she failed to live up to that expectation, things fell apart. In the end, Joel and Clementine find one another again, and choose to give their relationship a second chance. They no longer go into the relationship expecting perfection, which will ultimately be healthier for them.

1. Fight Club

The first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club… Unless we’re talking about the 1999 movie, of course. After the film premiered, young men everywhere began idolizing Tyler Durden, and real-life fight clubs sprang up across the world. However, for those that walked away from the movie feeling compelled to punch somebody in the face and burn their house down, they completely missed the point.

The audience can relate on some level to Durden’s rejection of consumerism, and “working jobs we hate so we can buy (bleep) we don’t need.” But his all-out rejection of society is incredibly dangerous. It is meant to show how easy it is for desperate men to rally behind radical ideologies. In the final scene, Project Mayhem blows up the entire city. We are meant to recognize that he is crazy, and not someone to be idolized. During an interview, the author of Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk, said: “Ideally, each person would leave Fight Club and go on to live whatever their dream was—that they would have a sense of potential and ability they could carry into whatever it was they wanted to achieve in the world. It wasn’t about perpetuating Fight Club itself.”

It’s often been said that songs are largely driven by emotion rather than meaning or complexity of the music. This certainly would explain why a scant three chords and a groovy haircut goes a long way and can help to sell a ton of records. Conversely, sometimes the lyrics can evoke equally powerful feelings — even when a song’s meaning is completely misunderstood.

From The Clash to The Kingsmen, here’s just a fraction of classic tunes that people continue to love, despite completely missing the point of what the songwriters were trying to say.

This is an encore presentation of this list, as presented by our YouTube host Simon Whistler. You can read the full list here!

It is surprisingly easy for historical myths to become historical facts because oftentimes people will prefer the version of a story that is the most entertaining or the easiest to remember rather than the one that is the most accurate. Sometimes, all it takes is for just one person to come up with a good lie, and, just like that, hundreds of years later it is still presented as fact.

Today we examine 10 of these myths, all about famous historical people who aren’t around anymore to clear the air themselves.

10. Lady Godiva and the Naked Ride

The story of Lady Godiva’s naked ride has been around for over 700 years. As the wife of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, she pleaded with her husband to lower taxes, which he said he would do if she would ride around town naked in the middle of the day. Godiva agreed to do this and, out of respect for her, all the peasants averted their gaze during her naked ride, except for one perv named Thomas who became known as Peeping Tom.

That’s the story. The existence of Lady Godiva (or Godifu, as was her real name) is well-attested. She lived during the mid-11th century and was married to Leofric, one of the richest men in Anglo-Saxon England. Everything else, however, seems to be fiction which was steadily added to the legend over the centuries. The first to mention it was the chronicler, Roger of Wendover, 200 years later, but he only made reference to Leofric’s challenge. He never said that Godiva actually went through with it. The “Peeping Tom” bit wasn’t even added until the 17th century, so there is no historical evidence that the naked ride ever took place.

9. Walter Raleigh and the Tobacco Craze

Staying in England, we take a look at one of the country’s leading adventurers – Sir Walter Raleigh. He explored and colonized the New World, fought the Spanish Armada, and even led an expedition to search for the fabled El Dorado. He is also credited with introducing tobacco to England. In fact, according to legend, the concept of smoking was so alien to Englishmen that when Raleigh’s servant first saw him smoke, he threw a bucket of water on him, thinking that his master was on fire.

So is any of this true? The story about the servant is obviously fiction, but Raleigh does deserve some partial credit because he played a role in popularizing tobacco, especially after supposedly convincing Queen Elizabeth I to try it. Everyone else copied the queen, so smoking became the new hip thing to do.

But Raleigh definitely did not introduce it because the Spanish had brought tobacco to Europe decades earlier. John Frampton had already published an English translation of the book “Of the Tabaco and of His Greate Vertues” by Spanish physician Nicolas Monardes, promoting the plant’s many medicinal qualities. So the English were aware of tobacco, they just weren’t interested in smoking it.

8. Guillotin and the Guillotine

You can probably guess by his name what Joseph-Ignace Guillotin is famous for but, contrary to myth, he did not invent the guillotine, arguably the most notorious execution method in history. In fact, the 18th-century French physician was a staunch abolitionist who did not believe in the death penalty at all. However, since getting rid of it completely was unrealistic, he advocated for a more humane method of execution, one which was quick, painless, and didn’t involve torture.

Ultimately, he got his wish, but he had no hand in the design or manufacture of the killing device. Several people were involved in its development, but the actual construction was done by a German harpsichord maker named Tobias Schmidt. 

The name “guillotine” stuck mainly due to a song published in a popular French journal, mocking the physician. Guillotin “bitterly regretted to the latest moment of his existence” this connection. There is another myth involving him that says that he died by guillotine which, again, is not true. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin died of old age at 75 years old. Afterward, his family petitioned the French government to change the name of the killing device, but it refused so the family changed their name instead.

7. Mussolini and His Trains

“Say what you want about Mussolini, but at least he made the trains run on time.” Or, at least, that’s what people bring up whenever they try to promote the virtues of an autocratic regime, or when they try to see the positives even in a worst-case scenario. Regardless of the motivation behind it, they should probably stop saying it simply because it is not true.

The whole “trains running on time” idea was propaganda used by Mussolini to advance the notion of fascist efficiency. Pretty much every biography on Mussolini comes with testimonies from people who lived or visited Italy during his reign and knew firsthand that the legendary precision and punctuality of Italian trains was more myth than reality. Not to mention the fact that many repairs and improvements on Italy’s railway system were done in the early 1920s before Mussolini even came to power, and he simply took the credit for them.

6. George Washington and the Cherry Tree

One day in 1738, Augustine Washington Sr. was walking around his plantation when he noticed that someone had cut down his favorite cherry tree. He suspected his young son, George, who had just received a hatchet for his sixth birthday. When Augustine confronted his son, George Washington admitted to the deed, saying that he “can not tell a lie.” Impressed with his bravery and honesty, Augustine Washington immediately forgave and embraced his son. 

It is a nice story that makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but it was completely made up by a man named Mason Locke Weems. After George Washington’s death, Weems became one of the first people to write a biography about the Founding Father. Titled simply The Life of Washington, it was published in 1800 and became a bestseller. 

It contained a lot of fictional stories, especially from Washington’s early years, since Weems’s main interest (besides making money, of course) was to turn Washington into a beloved role model for Americans rather than any kind of historical accuracy. The “cherry tree” story became the most popular myth associated with Washington, even though it didn’t actually appear until the book’s fifth edition in 1806.

5. Napoleon and the Sphinx’s Nose

The Great Sphinx of Giza is one of the most famous landmarks in the world. It is instantly recognizable and, strangely enough, one of its most defining features is something that is missing – the nose. Today, we probably couldn’t even picture the Sphinx with a nose but, obviously, it did have one at some point so… that begs the question: what happened to it?

Weirdly enough, the person who often gets the blame for the missing nose is Napoleon. In 1798, he led a campaign into Egypt and Syria, then part of the Ottoman Empire, and the story goes that an errant cannonball hit the Sphinx’s nose and smashed it to bits.

We can safely let Napoleon off the hook for this act of vandalism since there is pretty strong evidence that the Sphinx had already lost its nose before his time. Sketches by Danish explorer Frederic Louis Norden dated to 1737, decades before the French ruler was even born, show the Sphinx as we know it today. Going even further back, 15th-century historian Al-Maqrizi not only documented the loss of the nose but also blamed it on a man named Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr, who intentionally defaced the Sphinx as an act of iconoclasm.

4. Ben Franklin and His Turkeys

We’ve already covered one Founding Father, so let’s mention another one: Benjamin Franklin and his staunch admiration for turkeys, which supposedly prompted him to propose the turkey as America’s national symbol instead of the bald eagle.

There are a few kernels of truth in there, which is probably why this myth is so enduring. It is true that Franklin was part of the committee to select the national seal of America, alongside John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, so he would have had the opportunity to advocate for the turkey if he so desired but he did not do it. Instead, Franklin suggested a biblical scene showing Moses parting the Red Sea.

It is also true that Franklin preferred the turkey over the bald eagle. He thought the eagle was a lazy animal of “bad moral character” who lived by stealing food from other birds, whereas the turkey was more respectable and a “true original native of America.” However, he only shared these opinions in a private letter to his daughter. He never publicized them and he wasn’t even talking about the eagle from the Great Seal, but rather the eagle used by a club called the Society of Cincinnati, which some people thought looked more like a turkey than an eagle. The whole thing was just a joke that people didn’t get and that’s how the myth was born.

3. Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth

Juan Ponce de Leon was a 16th-century Spanish explorer and conquistador who led the first European expedition to Florida and served as the first Governor of Puerto Rico. However, the main thing he is remembered for today is his search for the mythical Fountain of Youth, a legendary spring capable of de-aging anyone who swam in its waters. 

Here’s the thing, though. Ponce de Leon never did that. The Fountain of Youth is not mentioned once in any of his letters or documents. His goal was something far more common and mundane – money. Specifically, he was searching for another island like Puerto Rico where he could enjoy another profitable governorship. 

The connection with the Fountain of Youth appeared after the explorer’s death and it was actually an attempt by a writer named Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés to discredit him. Oviedo disliked Ponce de Leon, so he wrote how the conquistador was tricked by the Native Americans to set off in pursuit of the Fountain of Youth. It was meant to make Ponce de Leon look like a gullible fool and the rest of the world bought it hook, line and sinker.

2. William Howard Taft and the Big Bathtub

William Howard Taft served as the 27th President of the United States, but people mainly remember him today for being so fat that he once got stuck in the White House bathtub and that it took six strong men to get him out.

It’s true that Taft was a large man. He stood almost six feet tall and weighed almost 350 pounds by the end of his presidency. He wasn’t called “Big Bill” for nothing, but even he wasn’t big enough to get stuck in the bathtub that had been installed in the White House especially for him. Yes, Taft had the forethought to order a custom-made tub that was seven feet long, three-and-a-half feet wide, and could easily accommodate four regular men. Weighing over a ton, it was at the time the largest bathtub built for one individual, so there was no way for Big Bill to get stuck inside it.

To top it all off, this story was never reported in the papers during Taft’s presidency. The first mention of it seems to appear in the memoir of an usher named Ike Hoover who worked in the White House for 42 years and published a book with all kinds of quirky and seedy stories from his time spent there.

1. Magellan and His Circumnavigation

Being the first to do something is almost a sure-fire way to make it into the history books. Some people even get lucky enough to become remembered for something they never actually did. Take, for example, 16th-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. If there is one thing that most people know about Magellan, it is that he was the first person to circumnavigate the globe in 1519.

Some places are more careful with their wording and say that Magellan led or “masterminded” the expedition that completed the first circumnavigation. This is more accurate, but still omits the fact that Magellan himself never finished the voyage. He was killed in the Philippines in 1521, and Juan Sebastian Elcano became the new captain, who saw the voyage to its completion.

Curiously, historians think that the person who probably deserves this accolade the most was a Malaysian slave named Enrique. Ten years earlier, Magellan picked him up in Malacca to serve as his interpreter. Enrique then traveled west with Magellan from Asia to Europe. Then, he set off in 1519 on Magellan’s fatal expedition, going from Europe to Asia. However, he left the ship after Magellan’s death in the Philippines, just a few hundred miles short of his point of origin in Malacca. We don’t know what happened to Enrique after that but, assuming he made it home, he would have completed the circumnavigation he had unwittingly started a decade earlier.

Literary critics have invented a host of phrases and concepts to separate artists from their art. By far the best known is “death of the author,” which comes from a 1967 essay by Roland Barthes. Essentially, the notion is to imagine that the author cannot be asked for their intent, or how their own life experiences shaped their writing, so the theorist’s interpretation is at least as valid as the author’s intention–provided said interpretation is reasonably derived from the text.  

While that’s a worthwhile literary exercise, there can be a problem that comes from many people knowing pieces of writing through cultural osmosis instead of actually reading the text. Indeed, sometimes there are aspects of the text that simply aren’t as haunting as the passages in stories that become touchstones. So interpretations of stories can be demonstrably incorrect. As is the case with…

10. The Hunchback of Notre Dame

When the 1995 Disney adaption of this movie came out, many critics and audience members were united in decrying the supposed borderline desecration of the original story. They pointed to the 1939 or 1920 versions of the story as proper adaptations, which properly portrayed the unsavory nature of Quasimodo, the tragic fate of the gypsy Esmeralda, clergyman Claude Frollo, and so on… and all in the shadow of one of the most celebrated buildings in French history.

It was a criticism completely undermined by how Victor Hugo wrote the original 1831 version of the story. As Lindsay Ellis explains in her highly recommended video essay, in the original novel, Quasimodo is a mere bit part and certainly not a sympathetic figure. There’s no tragic romance with the gypsy Esmeralda, who it turns out was actually a caucasian abandoned as a child. In brief, Hugo didn’t write his novel as a tragedy, so much as a tribute to the cathedral itself, which at the time of writing was less a French institution than a wreck that had been vandalized numerous times over the centuries and neglected.

That Hugo’s sympathies were with the building over the people who lived in and around it is much less surprising to anyone who knows that the original title was “Notre-Dame de Paris” and that he did not approve of the English title change. Perhaps that theme would resonate with misanthropic architecture students, but it certainly wouldn’t have been the crowd pleaser many subsequent adaptations have been  

9. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Washington Irving’s 1820 story, set in a Dutch community in 1790s New York (loosely based on real events), as we all know is about a schoolteacher named Ichabod Crane, who gets chased by a headless horseman across a bridge. When the horseman can’t catch him, he throws a pumpkin at Crane. Those who read an abridged version in class might remember that it was heavily implied that Brom Bones was pretending to be the Headless Hessian Horseman to scare off Crane so that he could marry Katrina Van Tassel without any competition from superstitious schoolteachers. Considering Ichabod disappears and Bones gets what he wants through pretty underhanded and aggressive means, it seems like this slice of Americana should be a pretty dark, spooky tale where the villain wins in the end, be he ghost or local tough guy in disguise.

Readers have that impression because many of them lost track of how odious a person Irving wrote Ichabod Crane to be. Like many schoolteachers of the time, Crane is described as having romantic interest purely for financial reasons (Irving explicitly describes him as looking at her father’s fortune with “green eyes”). He’s also explicitly a mooch and a glutton, only getting away with it because he knows a lot of local ghost lore. The story also ends with a postscript noting there was talk in Sleepy Hollow that Crane was seen again later, having moved to another community and becoming a judge. However, the locals rejected that because his supposed disappearance made for a better story. If anything, Irving went overboard in assuring audiences not to worry about ol’ Ichabod.  

8. Jabberwocky

Lewis Caroll’s titular monster, which was first introduced to readers in Alice Through the Looking Glass, has been portrayed as a serious beast in such adaptations as the 1985 movie. Even those who know better than to portray such serious versions of the monsters from the poem assume that “slivey toves” and “more raths” from the opening verse mean “unidentifiable beasts,” such as in the version done for The Muppet Show.

Jabberwocky’s origin was in 1855, in a magazine called Misch-Masch, which had a circulation of Lewis Carroll’s immediate family. It was not only meant as a parody of folk poems, but he actually handily explained what all the words meant, so those terms aren’t so much nonsense as coded. For example, “slivy toves” are actually cheese-eating badgers. “Mome Raths” are turtles. Bryllyg is said to be the early afternoon, as it refers to the time of broiling dinner. All things considered, the opening verse is much closer to a slightly offbeat version of Wind in the Willows than it is a surreal menagerie of cryptids.

7. Harrison Bergeron

In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story, equality is perverted so that every exceptional person is limited to be no better than the worst performing person, either by restraints that weigh them down or by zapping them if they think too much. This idea has been embraced by right wing publications like National Review. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia cited it in a ruling requiring tournament golfers to walk between shots.

What they don’t seem to notice is the portrayal of the eponymous character. As critics have more recently pointed out, Bergeron is a ridiculously overpowered human being who not only stands 7-feet tall at age 14, he is also literally capable of flying as he dances (once he removes his restraints that weigh hundreds of pounds). More revealingly, he proclaims himself “emperor,” which probably isn’t something Vonnegut would have a “heroic” character do.

He also makes this declaration and displays his powers on live television, which of course means that the Handicapper General Diana Moon Glampers would have no trouble hunting him down and shooting him, as she does seemingly effortlessly in the story. Clearly, Bergeron is a parody of the Howard Roark and John Gault-type supermen that are so perfect and so, so underappreciated in Ayn Rand’s novels. Considering Vonnegut’s left-wing views throughout his writing career, it’s objectivism that’s in his sights at least as much as socialism.

6. The Satanic Verses

When it was published in 1988, author Salman Rushdie struck free publicity gold when his book was interpreted as blasphemous and banned in India while the Ayatollah demanded his head. He surely didn’t celebrate this, as he had to go into hiding from very real threats. Several translators of the book were attacked—one fatally. Considering that the book is a formidable 600 pages long, it’s not so surprising that many people didn’t read the entire story and were content to go off a vague sense of what the novel was about, or a heavily abridged version.

The Satanic Verses tells the intertwined stories of two Southeast Asian Muslims, one born wealthy and the other poor. The pair both survive a plane crash, and the rich one becomes cursed (one way is he smells bad) while the other becomes angelic. Still, the rich one survives the novel while the other commits suicide while wanted for murder (he is unambiguously responsible for several deaths). The offending portions of the book are a secondary narrative of a few dozen pages about the rise of the prophet Mahound, written in an approximation of Koranic verse.

The “Satanic Verses” of the title are an allusion to a claim by the prophet that, for some contradictory statements he made, it must have been Satan pretending to be Allah. In a manner that paralleled a scene that offended many in The Last Temptation of Christ, Rushdie styled his parody of the prophet as a very elaborate dream sequence to give him plausible deniability that he was portraying an in-universe, fictional version. The version many Muslims were given, however, only showed the dream sequence without the larger context, and so inevitably it misled many on the intent of the book.     

5. Valley of the Dolls

These days, this 1966 novel is better known for selling forty million copies than it is for its contents. Its story of three women who try to enter show business but run into such pitfalls as creative compromise, sexual exploitation, and drug addiction (the “dolls” of the title are upper/downer pills) was so salacious for its time that it couldn’t help but become one of, literally, the bestselling books of all-time. No wonder it got a couple film adaptations: a much derided smash hit in 1968, and a TV movie in 1981.

An aspect of the literary juggernaut that, for decades, was held up as the impetus for its success was the titillation of guessing which characters were modeled on which specific real people. For example, was the character that had a pill addiction Judy Garland? Was the over-the-hill singer who stands in the protagonist’s way based on Ethel Merman? According to Jacqueline Susann, the answer to all these guesses was “no” and that all of the characters were invented to fit a theme instead of to reveal the truth behind a real entertainer’s persona. She eventually said of the misconception, “Let them think that, it sells more of my books.”  

4. Dracula

Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic isn’t just one of the two most influential horror novels of the 19th century (alongside Frankenstein). For many outside Central or Eastern Europe, it was the popularity of Dracula that led them to learn of 15th century Romanian ruler Vladislav III, better known as Vlad the Impaler. Deposed early in life, Vlad fought against both the Ottoman Empire and fellow Romanians and eventually died in battle, but not before leaving behind battlefields laden with impaled prisoners of war as an attempt to demoralize his enemies. Such a person seems tailor-made to inspire a monster in human shape.  

Which completely misunderstands Stoker’s real writing process. It’s not so much that he didn’t carefully study Vlad Tepisch’s life for inspiration for his iconic character, as there’s no evidence that he even knew the bygone monarch had existed. In 1890 (the year he began working on it) he noted that he read a book on Westphalia and came across the word Dracula, but he misinterpreted it as being the local word for “evil.” While Vlad is from approximately the same area of Europe as Dracula, Vlad was certainly not much associated with Transylvania, which would have been a key connection to invoking the memory of the historical figure. In short, Stoker seemed to have more lucked into the historical echoes than anything else.  

3. The Great Gatsby

Nearly 80 years after its initial disappointing release in 1925, F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age triumph sells roughly 500,000 copies a year. It’s resonated with readers enough to make its way to the silver screen in 1926, 1949, 1976, and 2013. Each release was greeted with a critical thrashing and to very mixed results at the box office.  

But that’s not to say readers, who generally regard themselves as more astute than movie fans, don’t mistake Fitzgerald’s intention with Gatsby. As explained by Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian, most people misinterpret Gatsby as being a suave charmer. There are a few telling descriptions that undermine this: His pink suits (tacky even in the Roaring ’20s) and his bewilderment in the face of the high society that narrator Nick Carraway takes for granted. That’s why he overcompensates for his parties, doing such things as hire entire orchestras. Gatsby is a dreamer, pining for the fantasy version from his youth of his neighbor Daisy Buchanan, not a man with his feet on the ground in the present. Not that this dissonance is anything new: Fitzgerald wrote back in the day that, “Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one has the slightest idea what the book was about.”

2. Don Quixote

It’s been just over 400 years since Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece was first published in English. Since then, the image of a nobleman putting a washing basin on his head, taking a nag for a noble steed and his trusty assistant Sancho Panza on a number of delusional, pointless quests in an attempt to restore chivalry to the land has only become more poignant. Don Quixote is both absurd and loveable, and many readers have mixed feelings about the ending where he regains his sanity enough to dictate in his will that his niece be disinherited if she marries a man who reads books of chivalry.  

As recounted in the New York Times, the title character actually comes across as much less sympathetic when you really look at the text. While Quixote means well, Cervantes does not skimp on the details of the pain he causes. Not just to his assistant Sancho Panza (who gets beat up because Quixote doesn’t pay a hotel bill), but even mules that can’t drink from their water trough because Quixote insists the water is holy. It’s an aspect of the story that is understandably omitted from adaptations such as Man of La Mancha, which contributed to those interpretations being dismissed as “kitsch.”

1. Slaughterhouse Five

Well, when an author writes as many famous satirical, morally complex, and whimsical stories as Kurt Vonnegut did, it’s not surprising that he’d have multiple works end up on lists like this. So it is with his 1969 anti-war classic (that he self-deprecatingly called his “famous Dresden novel”) about a WWII veteran named Billy Pilgrim, whose subjective experience of his life jumps back and forward through time. Within the intro of the book, Vonnegut quotes an associate who asked authors writing anti-war books why they didn’t instead write an “anti-glacier book.” Meaning, of course, that the human tendency towards war is as implacable as glaciers.

A similar sentiment is expressed by the alien race called the Tralfamadorians, who consider their own atrocities and eventual destruction of the universe as utterly inevitable, because they can see the entirety of all the time they live, all at once. Hence many have viewed it as a pro-fatalism book as they wonder whether the events of the book are real or not.

The text makes explicit that the aliens don’t exist. Within the book, the aliens Billy Pilgrim meets, and the environment they place him in (specifically a zoo), are described as something he read in a novel by hack sci-fi author Kilgore Trout. Further, Pilgrim does not express anything to anyone else about the aliens until after a plane crash that leaves him unconscious (i.e., likely with brain damage and trauma). As Michael Carson of Wrath-BearingTree.com points out, when Pilgrim first discusses the lessons he supposedly learned about the inevitability of war and the atrocities that come from it, it’s with a war hawk named Rumfoord, who Vonnegut mocks. Pilgrim merely echoes Rumfoord and then says he learned all of what Rumfoord told him on Tralfamadore.

On the other hand, Vonnegut also makes it explicit that the Tralfamadorians believe they will eventually destroy the universe. Vonnegut’s message isn’t that war and atrocities are inevitable, but that to follow this fatalist philosophy (that could come from absurd aliens that are the result of head trauma) makes its adherents into puppets, and leads to disaster for everyone.     

Adam & Dustin Koski also wrote the occult horror novel Not Meant to Know. Feel free to read and misinterpret it.

It’s often been said that songs are largely driven by emotion rather than meaning or complexity of the music. This certainly would explain why a scant three chords and a groovy haircut goes a long way and can help to sell a ton of records. Conversely, sometimes the lyrics can evoke equally powerful feelings — even when a song’s meaning is completely misunderstood.

From The Clash to The Kingsmen, here’s just a fraction of classic tunes that people continue to love, despite completely missing the point of what the songwriters were trying to say.

10. “Train In Vain” (The Clash)

Ever since its release from the seminal London Calling double album, “Train In Vain” arrived at the station shrouded in mystery — largely in part to the track not being listed on the sleeve or back cover. The song name would also become muddled after fans began calling it by its chorus, “Stand By Me,” as well as the actual title never being mentioned in the lyrics; furthermore, the toe-tapping tune has absolutely nothing to do with transportation or working out. Now 40 years later, the heart of the controversy lies in a simple printing snafu and a stubborn girlfriend.  

Written by Mick Jones, “Train In Vain” was originally intended to be used as a flexi-disk promotion for the British music magazine, NME. But when the deal fell through at the last minute, the band decided to tack it onto the master of their recently completed album. This, however, resulted in one small problem: the artwork, lyrics, liner notes, etc. had already gone to the printer. As a result, it landed on Side Four as Track 5 with the title crudely scratched on the original vinyl in the needle run-off area. Subsequent pressings would later include the proper title on the album — although in the U.S., it contained the variation, “Train In Vain (Stand By Me).”

The story behind the meaning is rooted in Jones’ ex-girlfriend, Slits guitarist Viv Albertine. Although Jones has remained somewhat tight-lipped about the doomed relationship, the feminist rock icon has been more candid: “I’m really proud to have inspired that but often he won’t admit to it. He used to get the train to my place in Shepherds Bush and I would not let him in. He was bleating on the doorstep. That was cruel.”  

The all-female Slits supported The Clash on their White Riot tour — and the alluring Albertine enjoyed a well-earned reputation of breaking many punk hearts, including Sid Vicious, Johnny Thunders, and Joe Strummer.

9. “There She Goes” (The La’s)

An undeniably catchy, jangly ballad, “There She Goes” appears to be a simple tale of unrequited love. However, the lyrics ”Racing through my brain… pulsing through my vein” reveal a not-so-innocent side. Additionally, frontman Lee Mavers’ eccentric and reclusive behavior only furthered drug-fueled speculation that the popular track drew inspiration from poppies. Yep, it’s about heroin.

Released as a single in 1988, the track earned the proto Britpop band from Liverpool earned critical praise before typical band infighting and chaos ensued. Although the song would be re-released two years later on their debut album under the Go! Disc label, The La’s had already been relegated to one-hit wonder status.

Later, the alt Christian-rock outfit Sixpence None The Richer covered the tune and enjoyed a major hit stateside — proving Jesus has a place in his heart for all saints and sinners.  

8. “Fire and Rain” (James Taylor)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOIo4lEpsPY

This one’s also about smack. Sorry. Taylor wrote “Fire and Rain” as a deeply personal reflection of life’s bumpy road, capturing all of its twists and turns and pains and joys. A remarkable feat considering he was only 20 years old at the time. From his second album, Sweet Baby James, the song’s structure unfolds like a three-act play with a beginning, middle, and end. Taylor explains in a 1972 interview with Rolling Stone:

“‘Fire and Rain’ has three verses. The first verse is about my reactions to the death of a friend. The second verse is about my arrival in this country with a monkey on my back, and there Jesus is an expression of my desperation in trying to get through the time when my body was aching and the time was at hand when I had to do it… And the third verse of that song refers to my recuperation in Austin Riggs (psychiatric facility) which lasted about five months.”

The end result earned the young singer/songwriter a multi-platinum record and a career that remains strong today over five decades later. But the “monkey on his back” would become a recurring affliction. Taylor first began using heroin after arriving in New York City in 1966 — a habit that escalated in London while briefly signed to The Beatles’ Apple Records label. Despite his personal and professional setbacks, Taylor has sold over 100 million records, and in 2000 became enshrined in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

7. “Dancing With Myself” (Billy Idol)

In his tell-all memoir, Dancing With Myself, the title is both metaphor and the name of one of his biggest hits. It’s also a cheeky double entendre for spanking the monkey. You know, the five knuckle shuffle. Jackin’ the beanstalk. Badgering the witness. Jerkin’ the gherkin. Okay, enough already — it’s about masturbation.

The song was first recorded in 1979 by Idol’s previous band, Gen X, and then re-released as a single in 1981 for the singer’s solo launch. Written by Idol and Gen X bassist, Tony James, the song was inspired in part during a Gen X tour of Japan in 1979. According to Idol, he and James visited a Tokyo disco, where they were surprised to find most of the crowd there dancing alone in front of a wall of mirrors instead of with each other.

However, when pressed on the subject, Idol later conceded there’s more than one layer: “There’s a masturbatory element to it, too. There’s a masturbatory element in those kids dancing with their own reflections. It’s not too much further to sexual masturbation. The song really is about these people being in a disenfranchised world where they’re left bereft dancing with their own reflections.”

Umm, sure, Billy, whatever you say. The song’s music video (which saw heavy rotation in MTV’s halcyon days) features a half-naked Idol thrusting and grinding with post-apocalyptic zombies. Oddly, there’s no mention of social anxiety, disillusionment or the despair of ennui. But then what do you expect from someone who kicks off his autobiography prologue with sordid tales of “never-ending booze, broads, and bikes, plus a steady diet of pot, cocaine, ecstasy, smack, opium, quaaludes, and reds.”

Long live rock & roll!

6. “Imagine” (John Lennon)

On the surface, this simple piano-driven ballad is a dreamy elixir for the soul, calling for an end to war, borders, religion, greed and hunger. The song would not only become a modern hymn of sorts for world peace and unity, but also helped solidify Lennon’s enduring legacy as a stand-alone rock and roll deity. But the ex-Beatle, who clearly understood the power of celebrity, was also a bit cryptic with the hidden message — one which he later characterized as his way of delivering a “sugarcoated” communist manifesto.

Masterfully arranged and co-produced by pre-felon, Phil Spector, in 1971, “Imagine” remains as relevant today as ever and ranks #3 in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs Of All-Time. But the main takeaway that’s often overlooked isn’t just some hippie ode to all love one another — but rather encourages people to use revolutionary methods and ideas to make the world a better place. Does this mean John Lennon spent his free time puffing on cigars with Fidel Castro in Havana or riding on the back of Che Guevara’s motorcycle through Bolivian jungles? Hardly.

Lennon much preferred the company of his wife and co-collaborator, Yoko Ono, at their spectacular estate in Ascot (and location for the song’s music video). Furthermore, Lennon set the record straight regarding party affiliations, stating “I am not particularly a communist and I do not belong to any movement.”

5. “Poker Face” (Lady Gaga)

Anyone who saw Gaga on Season 5 of American Horror Story knows this lady can get down. In fact, her convincing performance even won her a Golden Globe — which shouldn’t have been terribly surprising given her impressive real-life talent for switch-hitting. And no, we’re not talking baseball. As for that little ditty that launched Gaga’s career into another galaxy, “Poker Face” has little to do with playing cards. It’s all about bi-sexuality.

Co-written by Gaga with her longtime collaborator, Red One, the track is said to be a tribute to past conquests in Gaga’s wild ride to fame and fortune. It was first released in 2008 off her debut album (and prophetically named), Fame, and went on to become one of the best selling singles of all time. Featuring more hooks than a Bass Pro Shop, the song also benefits from that over-the-top accompanying music video, a wildly sexy romp that has since been viewed more times than every Kardashian sex tape combined. Well, maybe.

Unlike other songs on this list, the lyrics are fairly transparent and only get lost in the blinding glare cast by the singer’s hyper-radiant star. Nonetheless, it’s doesn’t take much imagination to decipher what she means when she playfully teases, “I’m just bluffin’ with my muffin.” Got it, Gaga. Message received, no distortion.

4. “Every Breath You Take” (The Police)

Ironically, the cops should’ve locked up these guys a long time ago for allowing this unofficial Stalker Anthem to become such a massive hit. Actually, it’s not their fault — but you’d think that someone as smart as Sting (only his name is stupid) would have anticipated that his lyrics would become so widely misinterpreted as both a sappy love song and a license to creep. Unfortunately, the subtext about a possessive lover with an Orwellian zeal for spying never quite registered with fans. Perhaps the band should’ve named the album something other than Synchronicity.

Sting wrote “Every Breath You Take” during a critical juncture in his life — both personally and professionally. Although The Police had enjoyed a mercurial run with sold-out arenas and multiple-platinum records, Sting felt cornered and wanted out. He had also become embroiled in an affair with his future wife,Trudie Styler, while inconveniently still married to her best friend, Frances Tomelty. Awkward. So, like any rock star with lots of money and access to private jets, he took off for the Caribbean, where he found refuge on Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye estate. There, he penned the song that became the band’s biggest hit and won the 1983 Grammy for Song Of The Year.

In a 1993 interview, Sting explains the inspiration: “I woke up in the middle of the night with that line in my head, sat down at the piano and had written it in half an hour. The tune itself is generic an aggregate of hundreds of others, but the words are interesting. It sounds like a comforting love song. I didn’t realize at the time how sinister it is. I think I was thinking of Big Brother, surveillance and control.”

3. “Death Or Glory” (The Clash)

The London-based rockers return with another entry on the list, which shouldn’t be a surprise from the group simply known as “the only band that matters.” Also from their London Calling album, “Death or Glory” is a parody about those who talk a big game but fail to back it up or wind up selling out to the man.

An upbeat tempo and satisfying melody accompanies possibly the greatest lyric in rock & roll history: “He who f**** nuns, will later join the church.” The amusing metaphor hammers home the point that those who fight hardest against conformity will eventually become what they vowed to avoid. It was apparently one of the band’s favorite songs on the album, recorded at Wessex Studios in Highbury, London for CBS records. According to legend, their eccentric producer, Guy Stevens, ran around the studio like a madman, throwing chairs and ladders during the session and even dumped a bottle of wine on Joe Strummer’s piano.

Interestingly, the song also reflects the band’s acceptance of change in terms of dealing with their own success while trying to stay loyal to their working class roots. Sadly, Strummer passed away in 2002, but unlike previous generations of rockers who pledged to die before they got old, this frontman actually did it.

2. “Born In The U.S.A.” (Bruce Springsteen)

Although many still believe this 1984 mega-hit reflects America’s ass-kicking greatness, the true meaning tells a much different story. But the confusion is understandable. The easy-to-remember chorus coupled with Springsteen’s trademark gravelly, blue-collar vocals practically screams baseball, hot dogs and apple pie. The Boss, however, wrote it as a scathing indictment of the U.S. military-industrial complex and the debacle of the Vietnam War.

Nonetheless, beginning with Ronald Reagan, politicians continue to misuse the song as a propaganda tool on the campaign trail. Perhaps taking time to actually listen to the lyrics, or better yet, having the words explained to them by the man himself would help to clarify the matter: “when you think about all the young men and women that died in Vietnam, and how many died since they’ve been back — surviving the war and coming back and not surviving — you have to think that, at the time, the country took advantage of their selflessness. There was a moment when they were just really generous with their lives.”

In “Born in the USA,” Springsteen pays a specific homage to the Hell experienced at Khe Sanh, where in 1968, a U.S. Marine garrison bravely withstood 77 days of relentless bombing in one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the war.

Fittingly for our purpose, Springsteen once called “Born in the USA” the “most misunderstood song since ‘Louie, Louie.’”

1. “Louie Louie” (The Kingsmen)

No list about misunderstood songs would be complete without including that 1963 golden oldie, “Louie Louie” by The Kingsmen. Featuring mostly indecipherable lyrics, it would eventually become the most recorded song in history with well over 1,000 versions, ranging from Barry White to Motorhead. But the bizarre, serpentine path that led to the rock n roll pantheon is as murky as the garbled vocals laid down in one take by an obscure, teen-aged garage band from Portland, Oregon.

In an equally strange, ironic twist, golden-voiced Harry Belafonte deserves some credit for the song’s wild odyssey. After all, his 1956 chart-topping album “Calypso” would inspire a doo-wop singer in L.A. named Richard Berry to hastily write down the original “Louie Louie” lyrics on a roll of toilet paper (yes, really) in hopes of cashing in on the popular island sound craze. In 1957, Berry and his band, The Pharaohs, recorded the track about a Jamaican sailor yearning for a girl as he laments to a bartender named Louie.  

Although the song enjoyed decent regional airplay, Berry sold the rights a few years later for $750 to help pay for his wedding (he would be justly compensated years later). Then in 1961, a singer in the Pacific Northwest named Rockin’ Robin Roberts covered the tune with his band, The Wailers — and that’s when The Kingsmen finally enter the picture.

Childhood school friends and bandmates Lynn Easton and Jack Fry had heard Roberts’ version playing on local jukeboxes around town and decided to try a recording of their own. And so on April 6, 1963, after coughing up 50 bucks to pay for a quickie studio session, the boys walked into Northwest Inc. Recording and a date with infamy.

The small studio had been set up for an instrumental arrangement only, forcing Ely to get up on his toes to be heard on a microphone dangling from the ceiling. Adding to the difficulty, he also wore braces at the time, producing his soon-to-be-legendary mumbled words. By October that year, the single had raced up the charts, fueled largely by the raw sound and its perceived obscene message.

The single was banned by several radio stations and declared indecent by the Governor of Indiana — and later investigated by the FBI. Eventually, the boys from Bridgetown would only be found guilty of poor enunciation (as well as Fry botching the third verse two bars too soon) but no charges were ever filed. It should be noted, however, Easton can be heard yelling “f***” at the fifty-four second mark after dropping his drumstick.

It is time, once again, to take 10 well-known persons from the past and explore the things that everyone thinks they did, that they didn’t actually do. In other words, 10 more myths about historical figures.

10. Ben Franklin and Daylight Saving Time

Undoubtedly, Benjamin Franklin was a pretty smart guy. In fact, there is a long list of useful things that he either invented or helped improve, but because he was such a prolific inventor, he is often also credited with things he had no business with. One such example is daylight saving time, the practice of setting the clocks forward by one hour during spring to make full use of the sunshine and then setting them back during the fall.

The notion that this idea came from the Founding Father dates back to 1784. At that time, the 78-year-old Franklin was living in Paris, where he was serving as an American envoy. He published an essay in the April 26 edition of the Journal de Paris where he wrote that Parisians would save a fortune on candles if they got up with the sunrise.

Here’s the thing, though. Franklin’s essay was clearly satire. He wrote how he was the first person in Paris to discover that the sun rises so early after being mistakenly woken up at six in the morning by a random noise and finding his room bathed in sunlight. He also wrote how he told his friends and they refused to believe that such a thing was possible.

Furthermore, Franklin made no mention of setting the clocks forward. Instead, the solutions he proposed (again, as satire) were to tax windows that had shutters and kept out the light, to limit the sale of candles to one pound per week per family, to ring the church bells every morning at six, and last, but not least, to fire cannons in the street to wake everyone up.

9. Fidel Castro and Baseball

Fidel Castro wore many hats in his lifetime: activist, revolutionary, political radical, guerrilla leader, ruthless dictator… And according to one enduring myth, he almost donned another hat – that of a New York Yankee.

There is no denying that Fidel Castro was a big fan of baseball. He was also decent at it, having played the sport during his college years in Havana. However, there’s a very big gap between “decent” and becoming a Yankee. At no point was Castro good enough to turn pro, but the popular story claims that he was once a prospect with the Yankees during the 1950s, occasionally changed to the Washington Senators. 

As with many good myths, this one might’ve had a seed of truth that helped it take form. It is possible, although by no means certain, that Castro could have taken part in a mass tryout staged in Cuba by Joe Cambria, a famed baseball scout who was responsible for bringing scores of Cuban players to America. Even if this happened, Castro would have never been seriously considered, but he liked the story and he certainly never made any efforts to discourage it.

8. Charles Lindbergh and the Transatlantic Flight

Charles Lindbergh might be the most famous aviator in history, but if you were to ask people what made him so famous, a lot of them would probably give you the wrong answer. They might say that Lindbergh performed the first transatlantic flight, back in May 1927, when he boarded the Spirit of St. Louis and flew from New York to Paris.

There is no denying that Lindbergh’s flight was a landmark moment in aviation history and even human history, for that matter, but it came with two important caveats that people tend to leave out – it was the first solo and nonstop transatlantic flight. That meant that Lindbergh flew straight from point A to point B without any stops along the way and he did it all alone. It’s still a remarkable feat, but it detracts from the fact that dozens of other people flew across the Atlantic before him.

If we are looking for the first nonstop transatlantic flight, then that honor belongs to John Alcock and Arthur Brown, who successfully finished their journey in June 1919, eight years before Lindbergh. And if we are looking for the first transatlantic flight ever, we only have to go back a few weeks earlier, to May 1919, when the crew of the Curtiss NC-4 flying boat commanded by Rear Admiral Albert Cushing Read did the flight in 19 days, after making multiple stops for repairs.

7. Cass Elliot and the Ham Sandwich

As grim as it may be, celebrity deaths are always a rich source of myths and urban legends. For example, did you know that Cass Elliot, better known as Mama Cass from her time with the Mamas & the Papas choked to death on a ham sandwich? Well, it’s not true, but the story appeared soon after her untimely death in London on July 29, 1974, and has stuck around ever since.

Who exactly was responsible for this idea is still uncertain. Some point the finger at a careless Met officer who opened his mouth to the press. Others say the first physician on site was to blame, as he, too, spoke to the media when he shouldn’t have, and mentioned that a half-eaten ham sandwich was present next to the body and could have been relevant to the cause of death. Since Cass Elliot’s weight had long been the subject of jokes in the media, this was all that some unscrupulous journalists needed in order to fashion a cruel but compelling demise for the singer.

A third alternative source for the rumor was Elliot’s manager, Allan Carr, who intentionally planted the story, although he had nobler intentions in mind. Besides her weight, Cass Elliot also had a pretty serious drug habit, so as soon as Carr heard that she had died suddenly, he assumed it was an overdose and thought that the ham sandwich story was a less shameful way to go. 

Eventually, British pathologist Keith Simpson performed the autopsy and found that the cause of death was a heart attack. No drugs or ham sandwiches were presented in Elliot’s system, but by then, the rumor had already become fact.

6. Ronald Reagan and Casablanca

Most people know that Ronald Reagan was an actor before turning to politics and, eventually, becoming President of the United States, but did you also know that, during his film career, Reagan almost played the lead in Casablanca?

This little piece of movie trivia is often presented as a fun “what if” of Hollywood history. What if Humphrey Bogart missed out on his most iconic role? Would Casablanca still have become a hit without him? Would the success of the movie deter Ronald Reagan from entering politics?

Just like before, the story of Reagan and Casablanca simply isn’t true, but on this occasion, we actually know exactly how the myth got started. It was the result of a press release put out by the Warner Bros. publicity office in early 1942, which stated that the movie would feature Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan. But this was so early in pre-production that work on the screenplay hadn’t even started yet and no casting decisions had been made. These kinds of press releases that didn’t convey any concrete information were relatively common back then, and they were simply intended to garner some extra publicity for the studio’s stars. 

The man who had the final say on the casting, producer Hal Wallis, later stated that he never seriously considered anyone other than Bogie for the role, although it is true that he initially wanted Ann Sheridan instead of Ingrid Bergman.

5. Albert Einstein and School Math

The name “Einstein” has become synonymous with “genius,” and given his larger-than-life presence, it is no wonder that multiple myths have spawned regarding him. The most famous one of all was, of course, that Einstein failed math in grade school. It’s a popular story because it makes us all feel better about our own mistakes and failures, and gives us hope that one day we can turn it all around.

While that last part is certainly possible, the bit about Einstein isn’t, although there is a kernel of truth in there. Albert Einstein was gifted in geometry, physics, and algebra from a young age, and by the time he was 11, he was already studying them at a college level. It is true that he failed an exam, although it wasn’t in grade school, it was the entrance exam to the Zurich Polytechnic. Einstein first took it when he was only 16, and he failed because the tests were in French, and that was a subject that young Albert did struggle with. He still nailed all the maths questions, though.

Another possible source of the myth was a reversal in the grading system of his school. Anyone going through Einstein’s academic record would notice that, at one point, he started getting loads of 6s, which should have been the lowest mark whereas 1 was the highest. However, Einstein didn’t suddenly get dumb. The school simply reversed the order of the grades, making 6 the highest. So sorry, but any way you slice it, Einstein has always been a child prodigy.

4. Gene Simmons and the Cow Tongue

The band KISS is known for several things: rock and rolling all night, partying every day, and staging outrageous and theatrical live performances. There are rockets, pyrotechnics, smoking guitars, fire-breathing, and, of course, makeup. On top of all that, bassist Gene Simmons became well-known for his prodigious tongue, which he proudly showed off at every opportunity. In fact, his tongue became so famous that people started having doubts that it was completely genuine. The rumor soon appeared that Simmons had enhanced his look by surgically replacing his own appendage with a cow tongue.

This is absurd, of course, for multiple reasons. Besides the fact that tongue transplants were medically impossible back when KISS first made it big in the early 70s, a cow’s tongue is almost 20 times larger than that of a human’s, so the difference would have been quite noticeable. Furthermore, although Simmons’ tongue is large, it’s not like it’s the largest ever or anything like that. It is simply larger than normal.

Lastly, the myth was debunked by the man himself. He referred to this story as his “favorite KISS rumor,” but confirmed that his tongue was 100 percent Gene Simmons.

3. George Washington Carver and Peanut Butter

George Washington Carver was a scientist whose efforts were integral to the agricultural economics of the United States, particularly the South which was entirely too reliant on cotton crops. And yet, he is mainly remembered as the “peanut butter guy,” which not only belittles his accomplishments, but it’s not even true.

Born into slavery, Carver wanted to help black sharecroppers who were perpetually indebted to white plantation owners by making their farms more productive. Cotton was, by far, America’s most profitable crop, but it was also very demanding on the soil. Since most black farmers barely scraped by on paper-thin profit margins, they had no choice but to plant the most valuable crop. But growing cotton season after season depleted the soil of nutrients, which was why Carver wanted them to practice crop rotation and alternate between crops to give the soil time to heal. But farmers were only willing to do this if they could actually profit off those other crops, which was why Carver started coming up with hundreds and hundreds of uses for soybeans, sweet potatoes, and, of course, peanuts.

Carver came up with over 300 uses for peanuts alone, ranging from shaving cream to glue to shampoo to all sorts of foodstuffs. And yet, peanut butter was not one of them because it already existed. The Aztecs and the Incas both made a paste out of roasted peanuts centuries earlier, and in modern times, several people applied for patents related to peanut butter, including Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.

2. George Crum and the Potato Chip

The story of how one of the world’s most popular snacks came to be is one of spite and happenstance. One day in 1853, a man visited Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York, and ordered fried potatoes. When his food arrived, the man promptly sent it back, complaining that the fries were too thick and not salty or crispy enough. 

The chef at the restaurant was a man of Native and African American descent named George Crum aka George Speck and he didn’t take kindly to fussy eaters. His potatoes were too thick? Fine, he sliced them as thinly as possible. They weren’t crispy or salty enough? Fine, he cooked them until they became crunchy and bathed them in salt. To his surprise, the patron loved them, and that’s how potato chips, or Saratoga chips, as Crum called them, were born.

To make the story even more fantastical, some versions claim that the patron was none other than railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to suggest that any part of the story is true. Crum was considered one of America’s master chefs of his day, and yet nobody hailed him as the inventor of the potato chip in his lifetime, not even Crum himself. This was a story that spread after his death, and the true inventor remains up for debate.

1. Walt Disney and the Frozen Head

Cryonics is the practice of freezing a human body soon after death, in the belief that future medical advances would allow us to bring it back to life. Sometimes, the entire body isn’t even needed; just the head. Surely, by the time medical science has advanced enough that resurrections have become possible, we would have overcome our need for a body and would be able to stick our brain into a computer, an android, a smart toaster, or something like that. There are plenty of people who have placed their hopes for a long-lasting life in cryonics including, if the myth is to be believed, its most famous patron, Walt Disney.

According to a popular urban legend, the head of the Head of the Disney Company is currently on ice, waiting for science to bypass the whole “death” thing. Some even say that it is stored in a freezer underneath Disneyland’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride.

There is no evidence to suggest that Walt Disney had any interest in cryonics, let alone that he froze himself. His own daughter debunked the myth, and records show that Disney had his body cremated after death. Some say that the rumor was started by a few rascally Disney employees, while others pin the blame on a reporter for an old tabloid called The National Spotlite.