HeyJaredMatt Hoffman
- Indexed articles, last 90 days
- 12
- Latest publication
- Sep 28, 2026
- Outlet visibility, for Mental Floss
- Top 50K sites
- Earliest in this view
- Aug 29, 2026
Latest articles
Why English Law Hanged Witches and Scottish Law Burned Them (opens the original)
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No one was burned at Salem. Mental Floss has answered that one before— it’s misconception No. 3 on our list about the trials—and the short version is that 19 of the 20 people the court killed in 1692 were hanged at a rocky outcrop called Proctor’s Ledge. The fire you’re picturing isn’t pure invention, though. Pop culture has long reinforced this iconic image, from René Clair’s 1942 romantic comedy I Married a Witch, where Jennifer’s ancestors are burned at the stake in Salem, to countless Hallow
7 Fall Traditions Kids Today Barely Experience Anymore (opens the original)
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The seven autumnal traditions below each receded for different reasons—an ordinance, a bankruptcy filing, a poll with a number attached, a line of federal statute that struck four words and inserted four others among them. All were once ordinary, but are now rare enough that an average kid would need them explained. When people say they miss how autumn used to smell, they’re usually talking about the smell of smoke from burning leaf piles, a practice that has been banned in many places across th
What the Lizzie Borden Rhyme Gets Wrong About the Real Case (opens the original)
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Almost everything the average person knows about the Borden family murders arrives as a jump-rope chant: Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother 40 whacks / When she saw what she had done / She gave her father 41. That’s the text Edmund Pearson printed in his 1924 true crime collection Studies in Murder, and it’s the text you know. But it’s wrong about the weapon, the arithmetic, and the identity of the woman upstairs was—and it’s silent about how the trial actually came out. Andrew and
10 Common Children’s Toys in the Middle Ages (opens the original)
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For most of the 20th century, historians argued that medieval parents didn't treat childhood as a stage of life worth marking, and then archaeologists started pulling toys out of the mud. The Thames foreshore alone has produced hundreds of miniature pewter playthings, and the London Museum's holdings of early base-metal toys are reckoned the largest of their kind anywhere. Wood, cloth and wax rotted, so what survived skews toward metal, bone and fired clay—what you get below is shaped by soil ch
Why Do We Say “Close, But No Cigar”? (opens the original)
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Ask where “close, but no cigar” comes from and you’re likely to get the same answer every time: carnival midways handed out cigars as prizes, and when a player came up short, the barker hollered this phrase after him. Only one half of that is documented, though—and the other half is the actual wording of this famous expression, which has a slightly murkier origin story. The cigars in this expression are real, and you can read about somebody failing to win one at a fair in 1902. In the book The N
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