EpicsClassic retold
Arjuna and the Bird's Eye
The great teacher Drona sets his young princes a simple test. A wooden bird sits high in a tree. Before they shoot, he asks each of them one question. Only one gives the answer he is waiting for.
MotivationBiography
Never Too Late
Anna Mary Moses spent her life on farms, raising a family and doing endless chores. In her late seventies she picked up a paintbrush. The world came to know her as Grandma Moses.
Famous LivesBiography
The Boy Who Gave the Blind Books
Louis Braille lost his sight as a small child in a French village. At fifteen, working late at night with a stylus and a sheet of paper, he invented a way for blind people to read with their fingertips.
Famous LivesBiography
The First Teacher
In 1848, a young woman in Pune walked to school every morning while people on the street threw mud and stones at her. Savitribai Phule kept walking, and opened the door to education for the girls of India.
HistoryHistorical narrative
The Milkmaid and the Cure
Country people in England said that milkmaids never caught smallpox. In 1796, a village doctor decided to find out whether they were right, and began the story of vaccines.
Famous LivesBiography
The Patent Clerk
In 1905, a 26-year-old clerk in a Swiss patent office, with no university job and no laboratory, wrote four papers in his spare time. Together they changed how we understand light, atoms, space and time.
FoundersBiography
The Piston Ring
Soichiro Honda was a blacksmith's son who fell in love with engines. His first real product failed almost every test. Then the war destroyed his factory, and an earthquake finished what the bombs began.
True StoriesTrue story
The Raft Kon-Tiki
In 1947, six men lashed nine balsa logs together and pushed off from the coast of Peru, heading for islands thousands of kilometres across the Pacific. Experts said the raft would sink within weeks.
HistoryHistorical narrative
The Stone That Spoke
For fourteen hundred years, nobody on Earth could read the writing of ancient Egypt. Then soldiers digging near the Nile found a broken slab of dark stone, and a young Frenchman made it speak.
Famous LivesBiography
The Light in the Shed
Marie Curie studied in secret as a girl in Warsaw, worked in a leaky Paris shed and discovered two new elements. She remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
Famous LivesBiography
Water at the Pump
Helen Keller could not see or hear, and had no words for anything, until a determined young teacher spelled into her hand at a water pump in Alabama.
ReflectionFable & folk tale
A Cup of Tea
A proud professor visits a Zen master to learn about Zen, and talks the whole time. The master quietly pours him some tea, and keeps on pouring.
For KidsOriginal story
Mira and the Experiment That Failed
Mira's seeds were supposed to grow faster with music. When nothing happened, she thought she had failed, until her grandfather showed her what a real scientist does next.
Life LessonsOriginal story
What I Learned From My First Job
A summer washing dishes in a busy restaurant kitchen taught more about work, respect and pride than any classroom did.