This Is True is a weekly newsletter rounding up weird news from around the world, summarized with witty comments by Randy Cassingham. It’s usually funny, sometimes sad, sometimes infuriating — but it always makes you think.
I’ve been a subscriber for years, and highly recommend it. One of the things I like about it is that he makes more effort to verify the stories than the typical “odd news” wire service that simply repeats something printed in a distant newspaper without realizing that it’s the local equivalent of the National Enquirer or Weekly World News.
Anyway, I could keep talking it up, or I could show you an example story using the True-a-Day service:
Cassingham also links to interesting news items on Twitter and on Facebook, though not the same articles as in the newsletter.
Waaay back in the dark ages of the Web (somewhere between 1994 and 1997) I discovered a weekly email newsletter called “This Is True.” It collected strange-but-true news stories from around the world, summarizing each in a short paragraph with a witty one-liner at the end. I subscribed to the free edition, and later to the full version, which had about twice as many stories. I even picked up a few of the books collecting past stories (at a con, I think, but I can’t remember which con).
Eventually I got too busy to read them, and the back-issues piled up unread, and I decided to let my subscription lapse. But earlier this year, I decided to re-up with the shorter, free version, and it’s still as good as ever.
Here’s a sample story, with a subscription form:
Update: It looks like Internet Explorer doesn’t understand how to convert from the character set on This is True’s website to the character set on this one. So IE users, you’re stuck with broken quotation marks and apostrophes. Firefox, Opera and Safari all convert them properly.
