Futility Closet, reorganised
Since 2005, Greg Ross has run Futility Closet, "an idler's miscellany of compendious amusements" — nearly 12,000 posts of puzzles, curious words, and strange-but-true history. The original site is a single chronological feed with no way to browse by what a piece actually is. This redesign starts somewhere else: real pieces, picked on purpose and laid out in full below — no infinite scroll, no luck required.
Every piece, so far
Hover or tab through the deck below.
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A puzzle
Portrait
A short logic puzzle about a mysterious Major Perkins — five statements, one certain conclusion.
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A puzzle
Long Distance
Three queens stuck on a single file, and a forced checkmate in seven moves.
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A puzzle
The Five Regiments
Route five regiments across a shared road network so that no two ever cross paths.
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A puzzle
Around the Block
An ant, a cube's vertices and face centers, and a walk that turns out to be impossible.
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A word
In a Word
Four obscure words worth knowing, and a small mystery on a brass plate in Edinburgh.
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A story
A Near Thing
A ghost, a coffin, a lift in Paris — and the site's own honest correction of its most famous tale.
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A curiosity
Tableau
Why so many dinosaur fossils are found frozen in the same dramatic death pose.
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A number
Friendly Numbers
Two numbers sharing the same abundancy ratio, and the open question of whether 10 has a partner at all.
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A number
A Pressing Appointment
A clock-face counting trick that reliably lands on 1, no matter where you start.
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A number
Of Thee I Sing
Why a 4-line poem has exactly 15 possible rhyme schemes — the same count as partitioning a set.
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A story
Faith and Hope
A deathbed-conversion story about Charles Darwin, and the letter that contradicts it.
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A story
Supervision
Pope John XXIII on waking at night worried about the world's problems.
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A story
Reflection
Stendhal's 1835 list of the women he had loved, written on the shore of a lake.
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A curiosity
A Wide Net
The stranger entries from the index of a 1685 English translation of Montaigne.
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A curiosity
Quinary
A 1721 Bohemian pilgrimage church built entirely around the number five.
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A curiosity
Weather and Art
What 12,000 paintings and a century of orchestral music reveal about historical weather.
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An oddity
Science Marches On
A 1915 investigation into a blind terrier who supposedly barked out the answers to arithmetic questions.