Mental Floss: От развлечений к знаниям

American online magazine and media company

Mental Floss (stylized as mental floss) is an online magazine and its related American digital, print, and e commerce media company focused on millennials. It is owned by Minute Media and based in New York City, United States. mentalfloss. com, which presents facts, puzzles, and trivia with a humorous tone, draws 20.5 million unique users a month. Its YouTube channel produces three weekly series and has 1.3 million subscribers. In October 2015, Mental Floss teamed with the National Geographic Channel for its first televised special, Brain Surgery Live with mental floss, the first brain surgery ever broadcast live. Launched in Birmingham, Alabama in 2001, the company has additional offices in Midtown Manhattan. The publication was included in Inc. magazine's list of the 5,000 fastest growing private companies. Before it became a web only publication in 2017, the magazine mental floss had a circulation of 160,000 and published six issues a year. The magazine had more than 100,000 subscribers in over 17 countries. The November/December 2016 issue was the last issue of the print edition of the magazine. Instead of getting a refund, subscribers were sent copies of The Week. The company frequently publishes books and sells humorous T shirts. It also developed a licensed trivia board game called Split Decision, similar to Trivial Pursuit. Its online store sells quirky home and office supplies, games and toys. Dennis Publishing bought Mental Floss in 2011. Mental Floss was acquired by Minute Media from the Felix Dennis estate in September 2018.

The magazine was co founded by William E. Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur while they were students at Duke University. According to the Mental Floss website, the idea came from conversations in the Duke cafeteria about the need for an entertaining educational magazine. According to Hattikudur, they wanted to "distill some of the best lectures from our favorite college professors. We thought if we could bottle their enthusiasm and deliver it in monthly installments, it'd be great." Pearson and Hattikidur were named two of thirty promising 2007 entrepreneurs in business magazine Inc. Mental Floss was sold to magazine mogul Felix Dennis in 2011 and again to Minute Media in late 2018. Beginning in June 2017, Will and Mangesh have been producing the podcast Part Time Genius, a variety style knowledge show, created in partner with HowStuffWorks. In addition to the magazine, a board game, a weekly CNN Headline News segment and a daily updated website, the two have collaborated on seven mental floss books.

Mangesh Hattikudur is an American businessman who is the co founder of Mental Floss, which he started with Pearson when both were students at Duke University. Hattikudur graduated from Duke in 2001, with a Bachelor of Arts degree. The Huffington Post in 2010 wrote that Hattikudur and Pearson have created a knowledge empire complete with board games, T shirts, and a website called mentalfloss. com which has monthly visitors tallying into the millions. They have collaborated on books such as The Mental Floss History of the United States along with writer Erik Sass. Will Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur met as freshmen at Duke University and in their senior year parlayed their cafeteria conversations into the first issue of mental floss magazine.

Novelist John Green worked for the magazine early in his career. Having later become an established YouTube personality, he began hosting its YouTube channel in March 2013. In 2014, the Mental Floss channel was listed on New Media Rockstars Top 100 Channels, ranked at #71. In 2015, Green won the Webby Award for mental floss on YouTube. Author A. J. Jacobs contributed articles based on what he learned reading the Encyclopædia Britannica, as described in his book The Know It All. He currently writes a history column answering reader mail. Ken Jennings, of Jeopardy! fame, wrote a feature called Six Degrees of Ken Jennings, in which he played the game six degrees of separation with two unrelated people or things, like Benedict XVI and Benedict Arnold or Isaac Newton and Apple Computer. He now contributes a quiz called "Kennections" on mentalfloss. com. Kara Kovalchik and Sandy Wood served as research editors for the magazine from 2002 to 2015. Celebrity chef Alton Brown wrote a food column and appeared on the cover of the September 2012 issue. Saturday Night Live writer Streeter Seidell has written for both mental floss magazine and the website. Comedian Amir Blumenfeld writes a column called The Curious Comedian. Author Ransom Riggs was a longtime contributor to both the magazine and website. Linguist Arika Okrent is the language editor for mental floss. In 2015 she received the Linguistic Society of America's Linguistics Journalism Award. Science journalist Maggie Koerth Baker was an assistant editor and co authored the 2009 mental floss book Be Amazing. Hank Green has written for the magazine and is executive producer of the YouTube Channel. He also authored the mental floss book Scatterbrained. Comedian Elliott Morgan hosts the weekly series "Misconceptions" on mental floss on YouTube. Comedian Max Silvestri has hosted two series on the mental floss YouTube Channel. Craig Benzine hosts the weekly series "The Big Question" on mental floss on YouTube.

Every year, Mental Floss published a "Ten Issue". It usually featured lists of ten things focusing on subjects like: "Ten Most Forgettable Presidents" or "Ten Famous Monkeys in Science". Initially, "Mental Floss" tried to feature self proclaimed mascot Albert Einstein on the cover of each issue. The magazine even did a 'swimsuit issue', which featured a topless Einstein.