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From today's featured article

The Bat is a three-act comedy-mystery play by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood that was first produced by Lincoln Wagenhals and Collin Kemper. The play opened on Broadway on August 23, 1920. At a rented summer home, Cornelia Van Gorder and guests search for stolen money while being stalked by a masked criminal known as "the Bat". The play originated as an adaptation of Rinehart's 1908 mystery novel The Circular Staircase. It was a critical and commercial success, running for 867 performances in New York and 327 in London, with tours by several road companies. It was revived twice on Broadway, in 1937 and 1953. It had several adaptations, including a 1926 novelization credited to Rinehart and Hopwood but ghostwritten by Stephen Vincent Benét. Three film adaptations were produced: The Bat (1926), The Bat Whispers (1930), and The Bat (1959). The play and its adaptations inspired other comedy-mysteries with similar settings, and influenced the creation of the comic-book superhero Batman. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Ludwigsburg Palace

... that Ludwigsburg Palace (pictured), the "Versailles of Swabia", was home to four of Württemberg's rulers?
... that Lydia May Ames, one of Cleveland's earliest women artists, is sometimes considered its first impressionist painter?
... that the seeds of the Nardouw fountain pincushion are carried underground by ants?
... that the writer İsmet Kür's father and sister were writers, and her daughter is also a writer?
... that the Austro-Italian ironclad arms race led to the Battle of Lissa, the first naval engagement between multiple armored warships?
... that in the midst of being chased by Aṅgulimāla, a brigand and serial killer, the Buddha stated: "I am standing still, you are not standing still"?
... that Red W Interactiva, a talk radio network in Mexico, operated for only 102 days?
... that a solar-powered device for extracting water from the air, co-designed by Evelyn Wang, has been compared to the moisture vaporators in Star Wars?

In the news

N. K. Jemisin

N. K. Jemisin (pictured) wins the Hugo Award for Best Novel for a third consecutive time for The Stone Sky.
Former UN Secretary-General and Nobel Peace Prize winner Kofi Annan dies at the age of 80.
The Asian Games open in Jakarta and Palembang, Indonesia.
Former Prime Minister of India Atal Bihari Vajpayee dies at the age of 93.

On this day

August 23: Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism/Black Ribbon Day in Canada, parts of the European Union, Georgia, and the United States

German tanks and soldiers in the Battle of Kursk

1514 – Ottoman forces defeated the Safavids at the Battle of Chaldiran, gaining control of eastern Anatolia and northern Iraq.
1898 – The Southern Cross Expedition, the first British venture of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, departed from London.
1921 – The Royal Navy's R-38, the world's largest airship at the time, was destroyed by a structural failure while in flight over Hull, killing 44 of the 49 crew aboard.
1943 – Second World War: The decisive Soviet victory in the Battle of Kursk (German tanks and soldiers pictured) gave the Red Army the strategic initiative for the rest of the war.
2011 – A 5.8 M_W earthquake struck the Piedmont region of Virginia, and was felt by more people than any other quake in U.S. history.

Radagaisus (d. 406) · Isabella of Aragon, Queen of Portugal (d. 1498) · Keith Moon (b. 1946)

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Today's featured picture

Belshazzar's Feast is an oil painting completed by the Dutch artist Rembrandt between 1635 and 1638. Drawing on the Biblical Book of Daniel, it depicts the Neo-Babylonian king Belshazzar holding a feast using sacred vessels looted from the Temple in Jerusalem. God, angered by this blasphemy, has inscribed the following writing on the wall: "God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting; your kingdom is given to the Medes and Persians". This painting, which has been seen as Rembrandt's attempt to establish himself as a painter of large, baroque history paintings, is in the National Gallery, London.

Painting: Rembrandt

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