Pieces we think are worth your time, chosen by us.
Mystery More than 400 carved stone balls, some weighing 26 tonnes, made by hand over a thousand years ago. We know who made them and roughly how. Nobody can say why.
Guess It A heavy glass dome with a hole in the top, found in sideboards and attics everywhere. Three plausible answers, and one that is correct.
Story Part one of five. Priya arrives to put the flowers out and finds eighty name cards in the wrong order, and works out who has a key.
Quiz Ten countries, three clues each, getting easier as they go. No maps, no flags, just geography, borders and the occasional oddity.
Countdown Fifteen very specific objects, sounds and rituals from a 1990s childhood, from the tape-deck pause button to the phone cord that reached exactly nowhere.
Countdown Circling before lying down, herding children, digging up the lawn and staring at nothing. Ten everyday dog behaviours traced back to the work the breed was shaped for.
Countdown Ten documented pieces of animal biology and behaviour that read like a wind-up, with the sources attached and the shaky ones left out.
Odd One Out A grid of identical arrows with exactly one impostor. The answer is generated from the puzzle data before the picture is drawn, so there is no argument about where it is.
Guess It Not exact prices, which nobody remembers reliably, but the comparisons: which of two things cost more at the time, and what that says about the period.
Mystery A 240-page medieval book written in an unknown script, illustrated with plants that do not exist. Here is what is actually established about it, and what is not.
Quiz Eight comparisons where the obvious answer is wrong, and the reason is almost always the same: maps distort, and mental maps distort more.
Countdown Sideways glass rain, a storm older than photography, and a moon with rivers of methane. Eight places where the weather report would be unprintable.
Countdown From wax cylinder to streaming, with the lifespan of each format and the specific thing that killed it. The shortest lasted about six years.
Two illustrated garden scenes built from the same source data, with a recorded list of deliberate changes. The difference count is exact, not approximate.
Countdown Takeaway food, block-of-flats living, graffiti about the neighbours and complaints about the landlord. Ten details of Roman daily life from the surviving evidence.
Explainer The chemistry behind the warnings on the back of the bottle, explained plainly: what reacts with what, what it produces, and the one habit that avoids all of it.
Explainer How to recognise the pressure tactics that almost every scam relies on, described in general terms, with a simple three-step habit that defeats all of them.
Countdown The poster, the radio-cassette, the pencil case with a combination lock: twelve objects that were in almost every 1980s bedroom and are now in almost none.
Guess It A flat metal disc with a wooden handle and a rippled edge, found in kitchen drawers everywhere. Here is what it did, and the three objects people usually confuse it with.
Countdown Venomous, electroreceptive, egg-laying and without a stomach. Ten documented facts about an animal that European scientists initially assumed was a hoax.
Myth or Fact Etymology attracts more invented stories than almost any subject. Ten origins, honestly sorted, plus the one test that catches nearly every fake.
Twelve claims that everybody repeats, checked one at a time. Four are true, five are false, and three are the interesting answer: partly.
Explainer Enclaves inside enclaves, a border through a library, and a line drawn with a ruler. Eight border oddities, each with a straightforward historical explanation.
Countdown Impossibly narrow homes, buildings constructed out of spite and windows bricked up on purpose. Nine architectural oddities with an entirely administrative explanation.
Story Part five of five. What changed after the christening, what did not, and the two times Sandra stood on the step in the rain.
Story Part four of five. The reason the neighbour had been moved to the top table was not the one Priya had spent all morning being angry about.
Story Part three of five. Priya had nine versions of what she was going to say. She used none of them, and asked for something she had not planned to ask for.
Story Part two of five. Dan arrives with the cake, and the gap between him seeing the room and understanding the room turns out to matter more than the cards did.
Myth or Fact Film sets generate legends faster than any other workplace. Eight of the most repeated stories, sorted into the documented, the disputed and the invented.
Story Part five of five. The move was right. That turned out to be the complicating factor rather than the ending.
Story Part four of five. He offered to turn the job down. She refused, for a reason that took him five weeks to understand.
Story Part three of five. Eleven things in one column, two things in the other, and the item that made the whole list impossible to argue with.
Story Part two of five. She took his jacket to the dry cleaner, went through the pockets out of habit, and found out how many times he had already been.
Story Part one of five. Marianne was holding a colander of green beans when her husband told her, in the past tense, that they were moving eleven hundred kilometres.
Myth or Fact Twelve pieces of household know-how from before the cupboard filled with sprays, sorted honestly into the ones with real chemistry behind them and the ones that are folklore.
Logic Puzzle A short ordering puzzle with a single provable answer. Every clue is needed, and a solver checks that only one arrangement fits before it is published.
