If you want to persuade someone, use words they understand.

Imagine making your final mortgage payment after 30 years. The house is finally yours. No bank. No mortgage. Then the county sends you another bill. And another one next year. Stop paying those bills long enough, and you could lose the house anyway. Welcome to property taxes in America. I've been seeing versions of the same story all over X lately. Someone spends decades paying off their mortgage, only to get hit with a $9,400 annual property tax bill. Oddly enough, that exact $9,400 figure keeps showing up in different posts. I'm not sure how many of these stories are genuine. But the underlying problem is real. According to ATTOM, the average property tax bill for a single-family home in the US reached $4,427 in 2025. That's up 3% from the year before. And depending on where you live, the bill can be considerably higher. Here's what often gets lost in these arguments. Paying off your mortgage means you've finished paying the bank. It doesn't mean you've finished paying for everything associated with owning the property. Property taxes fund a lot of the things people rely on every day. Public schools, fire departments, roads, and other local services. Those things don't become free just because your mortgage is gone. Fair enough. But consider someone who bought a modest house 30 years ago. Back then, the neighborhood wasn't particularly expensive. Over the decades, property values climbed. Maybe the area became fashionable. Maybe new businesses moved in. Maybe the entire city got more expensive. Great news if you're planning to sell. Not so great if you're retired, living on a fixed income, and have no intention of leaving. Your house might be worth three times what you paid for it. Your retirement check probably isn't. And although property tax rules vary widely by state and locality, rising assessments can mean higher bills. Some places offer exemptions, caps, or relief programs, but not everyone qualifies. That's the part I find interesting. A person can own a valuable house and still struggle to afford living in it. Of course, eliminating property taxes creates another problem. Someone still has to pay for the schools, firefighters, and everything else those taxes support. So there's no magical solution hiding here. But I can understand why homeowners get frustrated. They spent decades working toward a moment when the house would finally be paid off. Then they discovered that being done with the mortgage wasn't quite the same thing as being done paying. The bank eventually stops sending bills. The county doesn't.

The man behind Morse code used to be a painter. And not a casual one. Samuel Morse painted Gallery of the Louvre, cramming famous European masterpieces into one imaginary room so Americans could study them without crossing the Atlantic. Critics admired the work. The public largely shrugged. He sold it and eventually left painting behind for experiments with the telegraph. He couldn't get people interested in a room full of paintings. So he helped change how the world sent messages.

Georgia O'Keeffe's first appearance in a New York gallery came with two problems: she hadn't given permission, and the labels called her Virginia. In 1916, a friend showed her charcoal drawings to photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. He was impressed enough to exhibit them, without first securing her consent. In 1917, he gave her a solo show. In 1924, they married. That's one way to make an introduction. Getting someone's name right would've been a start.

Grandma Moses didn't get her first solo art show until she was 80. For decades, she'd worked on farms and raised a family. She only began painting seriously in her late seventies, drawing on memories of rural American life. In 1940, a New York gallery gave her a solo exhibition. Her work soon made her a popular celebrity, even as some art critics looked down on it. Most people would have called that chapter retirement. She called it a career.

Someone cut a doorway through The Last Supper. Around 1652, a passage was opened beneath Jesus's feet in Leonardo da Vinci's wall painting, permanently destroying part of the masterpiece. The work was painted on the wall of a monastery dining hall. Centuries of damage and restoration followed, but that missing patch is still visible. Even Leonardo couldn't win an argument with a floor plan.

Van Gogh painted 74 pictures during his last 70 days. He had moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, in 1890. In that short stretch he painted fields, houses, gardens and people at a pace averaging more than one picture a day. One of the best-known works from that period is Wheatfield with Crows. It's often called his last painting. But the Van Gogh Museum says he painted other works afterward, and Tree Roots is a more likely candidate. An extraordinary final summer. No need to invent a final brushstroke.

In 1961, MoMA displayed a Matisse upside down for about six weeks. A visitor, Genevieve Habert, spotted that the boat's reflection looked more detailed than the boat. Even Matisse's son had seen the show without noticing.

The Last Supper survived a bombing that destroyed much of the room around it. In 1943, the refectory lost its roof, vaults and east wall. Leonardo's painting survived, but it wasn't alone: the Crucifixion on the opposite wall survived too.

The Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911 by a glazier who had worked at the Louvre. Vincenzo Peruggia kept it for over two years, then tried to sell it to an Italian art dealer. The dealer called the authorities. Stealing it was easier than finding a buyer.

We still call it love when it doesn’t work out. So why do we call a dream a failure when it doesn’t come true?

In medieval timekeeping, a “moment” was a real unit: one-fortieth of an hour, or about 90 seconds on average. Because daylight hours changed with the seasons, so did the length of a moment. Somehow, “just a moment” has since become anything from five seconds to half an hour.

“A picture is worth a thousand words” isn’t an ancient Chinese proverb. In 1921, an American adman credited a similar saying to a Japanese philosopher. In 1927, he called a 10,000-word version a Chinese proverb. Apparently, ancient wisdom was easier to sell when it sounded foreign.

Snail racing is more brutal than it sounds. In 1995, a snail named Archie set a world racing record with a two-minute finish. He reportedly retired to a cabbage patch. At a snail race in France, the losers ended up in the cooking pot. Talk about racing for your life.

Your nose can run. So can your fridge. You can run a business, run for president, run a fever, or run out of money. None of it requires jogging. An Oxford English Dictionary editor counted 645 meanings for the verb “run.” Three letters. 645 jobs. Not a single day off.

There was a time when doctors officially classified people as idiots, imbeciles, or morons. And yes, there was an actual ranking. In the early 1900s, the categories were based on supposed “mental age”: Idiot: 1–2 years old Imbecile: 3–7 years old Moron: 8–12 years old Psychologist Henry Goddard introduced “moron” as a clinical label in 1910. Medicine eventually abandoned the system. The internet, however, kept all three.