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Josh Clark has wanted to be a professional writer since his third-grade teacher told him a short story he wrote was kind of good. He's written ever since. At HowStuffWorks.com, he's a senior writer and co-host of the Stuff You Should Know podcast. Josh lives with his wife, Umi. The pair really, really enjoys traveling, solving mysteries, having pizza parties and visiting museums (both renowned and obscure). Josh has been to the real-life house that served as the Robin's Nest on "Magnum, P.I." and is on an indefinite hiatus from being a jerk. You can find Josh on Facebook at the official Stuff You Should Know page and on Twitter at @SYSKPodcast.
Most Recent: Josh Clark Postings
On Clostridium difficile and fecal transplants
by Josh Clark | November 11, 2011
Remember the MRSA scare of a couple years ago? Remember, it was before the swine flu scare but after the SARS and avian flu scares. For those who can’t recollect, MRSA is a potentially fatal, antibiotic-resistant staph infection, essentially a superbacterium that a lot of researchers believe is the result of the overuse of things like antibacterial soap and the misuse of antibiotic medications. One of the things that made it so frightening was that otherwise healthy people were catching it in hospitals.
There are some places where finding a body part is, while likely startling for the finder, contextually allowable. Anyone wandering around a morgue, lifting up sheets and opening drawers like some gawking rube should be wholly unsurprised by anything he finds. We have set aside certain places like morgues and medical schools and rhinoplasty schools where dismembered heads and the like are allowed to be.
I don’t really have much to add to the post that was published on the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest blog, but the study they wrote about bears more than just simply passing along the link, I think. The post, “How walking through a doorway increases forgetting,” concerns a study out of Notre Dame that sought to get to the bottom of how the mind carves experience up into episodic memory.
If you listened to the not too terrible Do you lose the right to privacy after you die? episode, then you are one step ahead of everyone else who reads this post, as you are already familiar with Malin Masterton. I cited her PhD thesis on repatriating remains held in museum collections. Masterton’s position is [...]
I was in Manhattan recently and waiting for the train back to Brooklyn when Umi pointed out three girls about ten years old standing on the opposite platform also waiting for a train, entirely on their own. It’s so strange to see that, three girls moving around arguably one of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. without any adult. New York is something of a loner in this respect. Kids travel unaccompanied in small towns, sure, but not in larger cities.
It was the Quakers who came up with the concept of solitary confinement. As Brooke Shelby Biggs, the author of a fine Mother Jones article on the subject tells it, when the Quakers built their Walnut Street jail in Philadelphia in 1791, it was revolutionary, the first prison designed to not only house inmates as they awaited execution, but possibly to rehabilitate them as well so that they could return to society once more.
There’s a big debate going on that you might not be aware of in the field of Egyptology, according to New Scientist. It’s about whether or not the boy pharaoh Tutankhamen had a left club foot. As you might guess, one side says yes he did, the other says no he didn’t. What’s lucky is [...]
Some stuff I’ve learned recently is as follows:
There is at least an unwritten policy of FEMA called the Waffle House index, which uses whether Waffle Houses in an area are open to determine the level of impact a disaster had on that area. The logic goes that since Waffle Houses are open 24 hours a day every day of the year, if one is closed then an area must be in pretty bad shape. Either the water’s too high for the employees to reach it or the employees are all dead. In either case, the area around the Waffle House could use assistance.
Humans Training for Space Exploration All Over the Place
by Josh Clark | September 20, 2011
If you were to put on weighted boots and scuba gear and shuffle off into the water of Largo Sound at Key Largo, Florida, and were you lucky enough, you may wander smack dab into a camper-sized structure in the shape of a Dumpster®. This would be the famed Jules Undersea Lodge, the only true undersea lodging open to the public. Any type of underwater quarters are few and far between as a Hotel Club.com blogger found when he tried to come up with a Top Five Underwater Hotels post (one of which is partially above water and three of which are under construction). It is the Jules alone that stands as the only true current underwater lodge that is fully complete, as it was established in 1986.
The Fraudulent Chicanery of the Professional Wildlife Photographer
by Josh Clark | September 19, 2011
A Norwegian wildlife photographer living and working in Sweden has had a rough few weeks, though deservedly. The photog, Terje Hellese, was cold busted using Photoshop to doctor his photos. Apparently, he would shoot an exotic locale to use as a backdrop and cut and pasted images of lynxes he grabbed from stock photo websites. Were Hellese just some photographer, this would be a big deal, tantamount to a writer from the Toledo Blade blatantly plagiarizing another reporter’s work. But Hellese is not just some photographer.
Recent Postings by Category
BrainStuff
- Thank You and Best Wishes to Marshall Brain
- Contest – Design a $300 house and win $25,000
- How the Philtrum works – the place under your nose where your face comes together
The Coolest Stuff on the Planet
- Golden Fields of Canola
- The Park That Never Sleeps: Central Park
- Draw a Pretty Picture With Your Bike and Your Phone
Keep Asking
- Why can a 5 foot 8 inch man dunk a basketball on a 10 foot rim while some people of taller stature can’t?
- What happens to our sun once it runs out of fuel?
- How do we know the age of the universe?
Stuff Mom Never Told You
- Who invented the Christmas card?
- How the Kinsey Report Fueled Whiskey Sales
- How to Get Your Wedding Announcement into The New York Times
Stuff to Blow Your Mind
- Blow Your Mind: Nebula in a Box
- Blow Your Mind: Three Minutes Till Impact
- Touching the Void: Psychedelics and Death
Stuff You Should Know
- Stuff You Should Know at SXSW
- The Southern Death Cult, the Maya and Georgia
- Deformed Baby Spider Brains
The Stuff of Genius
CarStuff
- Listener Mail: What’s the world’s largest engine?
- Listener Mail: What makes a “classic car” classic?
- Was Chrysler’s “It’s Halftime in America” Super Bowl commercial a little too political?
How-to Stuff
- How to Enjoy the Fruits of Your Labor
- How to Travel the World in 4 Days
- How to Smell Like Someone at HowStuffWorks
PopStuff
- PopStuff Show Notes: Episode 68: Astrology: What’s PopStuff’s Sign?
- PopStuff Show Notes: Episode 67: Collecting: PopStuff’s Cabinet of Curiosities
- PopStuff Show Notes: Episode 66: Tracy and Holly’s Running Playlists
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know
- Good News from the Oldest Mayan Calendar
- One Year Later: Colony Collapse Disorder
- Who Killed Martin Luther King, Jr.?
Stuff to Change the World
- Who will own the Arctic?
- Obesity: The New Global Crisis
- Bill Gates Makes For A Pretty Decent Cartoon
Stuff You Missed in History Class
- Butch Cassidy: Should we read between the lines?
- Are we rooting for D.B. Cooper?
- Party Time: A Look at Unconventional Politics
