› added 5 months ago

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TIL that Thomas Dewey was so widely expected to win the 1948 Election against President Harry Truman that James Maloney, the Head of Secret Service, dispatched most of Truman's Secret Service detail to New York to prepare to guard Dewey. A few weeks after Truman won re-election, he dismissed Maloney

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nWG7B TIL "feeling that something is wet is quite a feat because our skin does not have receptors that sense wetness"
WjKB TIL that “spaghetti” is actually the plural form of the word. An individual strand is referred to as a “spaghetto”
MeW6a TIL 12 states still have not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment.
aZpN TIL that the USSR sent so many scientists and engineers to the gulag prisons that the government set up labs for them. While workers in the ‘Sharashka’ facilities did not have to perform hard labor like other inmates, their work was published under the names of more famous Soviet scientists.
xVOJ1 TIL how the marathon got its name. The event was instituted in commemoration of the fabled (meaning it's a myth) run of the Greek soldier Pheidippides, a messenger from the Battle of Marathon to Athens, who reported the victory and died from exhaustion later on.