Interesting websites you never knew existed

There is a particular kind of website that never goes viral but quietly fills your afternoon: a daily blog of paradoxes, an atlas of odd places, an archive of out-of-copyright monsters. These are the interesting websites that deserve to be better known.

Atlas Obscura catalogs strange places and hidden wonders around the world. Damn Interesting publishes long, well-researched stories of strange true events, and posts are infrequent enough to be worth the wait. Futility Closet is a daily miscellany of paradoxes, puzzles and forgotten history, short enough to read in a minute. The Public Domain Review digs up unusual out-of-copyright art, essays and curiosities. Weird Universe tracks odd news and inventions.

Then there are the interesting websites with numbers behind them. Our World in Data has explorable charts about how the world is changing. Astronomy Picture of the Day has published a new space image with an expert caption since 1995. OneZoom lets you zoom through the whole tree of life.

Use "Surprise me from this list" for a random pick. Each card tells you how long it takes and whether it works on mobile, and we flag the few with mature topics, like Wikipedia: Unusual Articles and Know Your Meme.