What's the Pocket Polymath?

Trying to dodge the doom scroll? Conversation with your dad-in-law dried up? Fancy being the most fascinating person at the pub?

The Pocket Polymath is a weekly roundup for the insatiably curious. It’s for knowledge nerds, fact fans, learning lovers, Wikipedia spiral-survivors – and anyone who’s ever Googled “how deep is the Mariana Trench” at 2am and somehow ended up learning about medieval cheese laws.

It's curated and collated by me, Joanna Cummings. I love total nerdery, bathos and obscure jokes. I'm also bitter that I'm not clever enough to be a genius, and a polymath was the next best thing I could aim for.

So if you want to join me on my quest to be the smartest, wittiest or frankly nerdiest person in the room, sign up to enjoy a compact curation of unexpected stories direct to your inbox. It’s really the only way to make sure you catch the important facts of the day, such as what gynaecology has to do with Stonehenge, how the Nazis invented Fanta or why certain fish have see-through heads.

And down the rabbit hole we go…