It’s hard to reconcile the wave of mass shootings that have gripped the world lately. Mass murder is too far outside of what we can understand. For most of us, it’s so inconceivable that it seems inhuman, like something no person with a brain and a body like our own could ever do.

We’re so desperate to understand it that we come up with any kind of explanation that we can wrap our minds around. Perhaps it’s the media’s fault, we think—or bullying, or gun laws, or video games, or TV.

But the murderers haven’t tried to hide why they did. Before nearly every massacre, the shooters have told us exactly what they were thinking. They’ve written manifestos that let us see what’s happening inside their broken minds. They’ve spelled out the twisted logic that brought them to kill.

They’ve given us their answers, in their own twisted way. But be warned: These are the thoughts of deranged minds, and the answers are never as simple as we want them to be.

[Read the full article at Listverse.]

“For Sale: A New Way Of Life.”

Bill Myers had seen the promise splashed across newspapers and magazines around the country. Life in Levittown, America’s first suburbia, meant more than just moving into a community filled with completely identical houses. It meant having a home, a community, and a sense of security. It meant moving into a new America.

But there was one thing the Myers family didn’t realize until they’d moved in. Those rows upon rows of two-story houses with white picket fences weren’t the only things in Levittown that were identical. The people were, too.

America’s first suburbs were filled, as a strict policy, with rows upon rows of nothing but white faces — and when Bill Myers and his family became the first black family in the American suburbs, they’d find out just how little they fit in.

[Read the full article at All That Is Interesting.]

Sometimes it feels like scientists are getting pretty close to solving every mystery there is. We have theories on wormholes, dark matter, the beginning of the universe, and a whole map of how single-celled organisms evolved into human beings. We’ve solved some mysteries so complex that it boggles the mind to even think about them. Sometimes, it seems like there’s an answer to almost any question you can imagine.

But as it turns out, we don’t quite have everything figured out. There are extremely simple questions that nobody’s been able to figure out how to answer—some that sound so simple and obvious that you’d almost feel stupid asking them in the first place.

[Read the full article at Listverse.]

There might be a reason why politics has been so crazy lately. Over the past two years, we’ve seen conservatives and liberals stretch their beliefs into some completely insane territories. We’ve seen the rise of neo-Nazis and anti-fascists, and we’ve seen them get violent.

As it turns out, all of this might just be on purpose. Recent reports are saying that a lot of the extreme social media accounts that have been pushing these agendas weren’t created by Americans at all. Thousands of them were created in Russia as part of a propaganda war to tear the United States apart.

It’s an old Cold War tactic. In the words of one Russian political strategist, it’s designed to encourage “all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts” and destabilize American politics. And now that Facebook has let them reach more than 126 million people, it’s working better than ever.

It sounds like an insane conspiracy theory, but this is really happening. And it’s bringing something important to light. We’re seeing the fractures that tear a nation apart exposed for what they are. We’re seeing what Russia thinks could break America—and, in the process, we’re getting a map of what needs to be fixed to put it back together again.

[Read the full article at Listverse.]

No pirate left a legacy like Blackbeard’s. In the two short years he spent terrorizing America and the West Indies, he built up a reputation as the fiercest, dirtiest, and most terrifying pirate on the seven seas.

Today, he’s become more of a myth than a man. We almost see him as the ultimate badass, a pirate who could strike fear into the hearts of anyone who stood in his way. And that isn’t exactly wrong. But Blackbeard wasn’t just some cool, tough, but likable antihero. He was incredibly dangerous—and completely out of his mind.

[Read the full article at Listverse.]

A strange thing happened on Western Frontier. During the days of Wild West, American pioneers were moving out into untamed and treacherous land. They were building their homes in a virtual war zone, on land stolen from the natives, and that meant that their lives—and the lives of their children—were constantly at risk.

Pioneer children, in the days of the American frontier, would often be kidnapped by raiding warriors. When Native American tribes lost their own children in wars with the settlers, they would even the score. They would raid a white village, take their children, and carry them back to their homes as hostages. But when their families tracked them down and tried to rescue them, sometimes, the children didn’t want to go home.

It was a strange phenomenon the settlers of America struggled to understand. Even Benjamin Franklin commented on it. “They become disgusted with our manner of life,” he once wrote about the white children captured by native tribes, “and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”

[Read the full article at Listverse.]

When the strange and horrific intrude on our lives, it can be hard to convince anyone that they really happened. It used to be that the worst things that would happen in a person’s life would stay private, things known only by a small group of friends—or, if the stories spread, urban legends that no one knew whether to believe.

But today, it’s different. Since the invention of the Internet, pictures and movies of strange and terrifying things have been going up online. Killers have posted their thoughts for everyone to see. And the world has been able to watch true horror stories play out in real time, right on their computer screen.

[Read the full article at Listverse.]