The De-Textbook: The Stuff You Didn't Know About the Stuff You Thought You Knew - Hardcover

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Founded in 1958 as a print publication, Cracked.com has been published exclusively online since 2006. Jack O’Brien, the site’s editor in chief, lives in New York.

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EDITOR IN CHIEF

Jack O’Brien

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

David Wong

HEAD WRITER

Daniel O’Brien

SENIOR EDITORS

Michael Swaim, Robert Brockway, Soren Bowie, Kristi Harrison, Adam Tod Brown, Cody Johnston

CONTRIBUTORS

Jacopo della Quercia, Robert Evans, C. Coville, Eddie Rodriguez, Alexander L. Hoffman, Karl Smallwood, Cyriaque Lamar, Tom Reimann, Maxwell Yezpitelok, S. Peter Davis, Christian Ames, R. Jason Benson, Kathy Benjamin, Danny Harkins, Eric Yosomono, Juan Arteaga, David Dietle, Elford Alley, Pauli Poisuo, Christina H., Crystal Beran, Dennis Hong, Rohan Ramakrishnan, Cezary Jan Strusiewicz, Clive Jameson, Evan V. Symon, Jake Klink, Levi Ritchi, Lola C., M. Asher Cantrell, Xavier Jackson, Adam Wears, Brendan McGinley, Christian-Madera, Colin Murdock, Craig Thomas, Dan Seitz, David A. Vindiola, Geoffrey Young, J. F. Sargent, Jack Mendoza, Jake Slocum, Jonathan Wojcik, Justin Crockett, Katherine Smith, Kenny Thompson, Kevin Forde, Mark M., Martin Bear, Michael Voll, Mohammed Shariff, Nathan Birch, Philip Moon, Rob Sylvester, S. Peter Davis, Samuel Bloodthirst, Shayn Nicely, Steve Kolenberg, Tom Lagana, XJ Selman

ART DIRECTORS

Monique Wolf, Randall Maynard

COVER ART

Adam Simpson

COPY EDITORS

Sheila Moody, Erica Ferguson, Andrea Reuter

SPECIAL THANKS

Becky Cole, Kate Napolitano, Jaya Miceli, Demand Media, Dan Strone at Trident Media Group, John Cheese, Sean Reiley, Chris Bucholz, Wayne Gladstone, Luke McKinney, Ian Fortey, Alex Green, Kristin Plate, spouses, moms, dads

For granting us continual existence through its inconceivable power, we dedicate this book to the sun. Thanks for not eating us yet.

The Authors

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction
A Brief Recap of Your Squandered Education

CHAPTER 1

Health and Anatomy
Stuck inside an insane machine with a user’s guide made of lies

CHAPTER 2

Biology
The propaganda campaign to make you think all cool animals are dead

CHAPTER 3

World History
If it was written by the winners, they are boring liars

CHAPTER 4

Sex Education
Lies about your junk and how to use it

CHAPTER 5

Physics
The universe is an unpredictable magic show

CHAPTER 6

U.S. History
The (bullshit) superhero movie

CHAPTER 7

Health and Nutrition
Tricked into living fat and dying young

CHAPTER 8

Practical Psychology
How to keep your brain from screwing you

Credits

Even before our own mothers, the Cracked editors would like to thank the heaps of talented comedy writers who fearlessly throw their ideas to the wolves every day in our Writer’s Workshop. Without their tireless hunt for all things fascinating and their long-suffering tolerance of our fickle, occasionally drunken demands, this book would never have been possible.

We would also like to thank the wolves, those Workshop and forum moderators who believe in something greater than themselves, and have inexplicably chosen a comedy website as that something. They never kill an idea or a profile without reverence and necessity, and in doing so, maintain the precarious balance between fascist order and lawless swill hole that Cracked could collapse into without their diligence.

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Randall Maynard, Monique Wolf, and the rest of the design team for arranging every inch of this book, as well as Andrea Reuter for her patient and flawless copyediting. The debt of gratitude, we should note, has no monetary value because we already paid them handsomely. If they are shoeless and blackout drunk in a box somewhere today, that’s on them.

Thanks also to everyone at Demand Media, first and foremost Richard Rosenblatt, Shawn Colo, Stewart Marlborough, our PR, marketing, sales, and especially our legal team for allowing us to continue this extensive, highly scientific experiment into the healing properties of dick jokes. Also, thank you to the Cracked team including Abe Epperson, Adam Ganser, Breandan Carter, Mandy Ng, Simon Ja, Billy Janes, Greg Shabonav, Stephen Lopez, Jason Gu, and Mitchell Thomas, who keep the entire site running.

We would especially like to thank Kathleen Napolitano and Becky Cole from Penguin, Jaya Miceli and Adam Simpson for designing the polished cover you now hold in your strong and capable hands, and our agent Dan Strone from Trident Media Group for understanding the importance of foul language and tasteful nudity.

Lastly, thank you to those once great leaders of Cracked who couldn’t be here today, Oren Katzeff and Greg Boudewijn. They are in a better place now, at higher-paying jobs.

Oh shit, and our moms! Sorry, moms, for saying “shit” just now.

Welcome to school, the propaganda wing of your parents’ battle to win your hearts and minds, or at least get you to “quiet down for a single goddamn second before Mommy does something crazy.” An annoying number of pointless questions are going to start popping into your head. You come into the conscious part of your life as a barely contained vortex of pure uncut curiosity, and the people in charge of your education are like Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon movies—counting down the days until they’re able to retire with some peace and quiet, and most assuredly too old for this shit.

Teachers are fighting a nonstop battle to bring the energy in the room down to their level, which meant there was some stuff they couldn’t tell you about. Because the truth is, and don’t tell them we told you this, the world around you is fucking amazing. It’s just way easier to manage a classroom full of children on the verge of falling asleep than one that is vibrating with sheer, joyous energy because nobody can freaking believe how goddamn amazing blue whales are!

And so, they edited the coolest stuff out of the stories they taught you, inundated you with dates and names and other curiosity-dampening instruments to clog the information-craving hole in your brain that churns out questions like, “Yeah, but why is the stuff inside of the leaves green?”

One thing is for certain: They never came clean about completely biffing your education, which is how you came to construct your view of the world on a foundation of lies and half-truths that totally missed the point.

In case you’re wondering what they could have gotten so terribly wrong, here’s a quick preview of one of the incredible history lessons nobody taught you. Bear with us, because this is weird. And it has massive implications for everything you’ve ever read on any subject ever.

Homeric scholar William Gladstone was going through The Iliad for the thousandth time when he noticed something odd. Despite being one of the best poets ever to put pen to paper, Homer sucked at describing colors. He described the ocean, oxen, and sheep as being the color of wine. He described honey and a nightingale as being green, and the sky as being bronze. At one point he described Hector’s hair as being the color of a stone that we know to be blue. Gladstone, who was so smart that he’d eventually become the prime minister of England four times, started going through and counting all the colors referenced in the book. There were thousands of blacks and whites, a handful of reds, yellows, and greens, and, assuming Hector wasn’t a Smurf, no blue at all.

Following Gladstone’s lead, scholars expanded the search for the color blue in ancient Greek writing. Nothing in Aristotle. Even the color theorist Empedocles didn’t mention it, and writing about...