About

One unsolved mystery, every morning.

The Half-Known publishes one open question every day at 8am Eastern — science, history, philosophy, anything genuinely unresolved. Each takes about five minutes.

Every piece runs the same shape: what's actually established, why the question has resisted an answer this long, the theories still in contention, and what it would take to settle it. At the end there's a poll. You pick the explanation you find most convincing and see where that puts you against everyone else who read it.

The standard

Every factual claim traces to a source listed at the foot of the article. Where something rests on a single account, or is actively disputed, the piece says so instead of smoothing it over. Where a mystery is closer to solved than its reputation suggests, that gets said too — the Dyatlov Pass piece opens its verdict on the physics paper that probably explains it, because pretending otherwise would be more fun and less true.

Some of these involve real people who died badly, occasionally recently enough to have surviving family. Those are written with that in mind.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, say so: hello@thehalfknown.com. Errors get fixed on the page.