✉️ Frank's Five — Five Facts, Every Friday, Free
Every Friday morning, before your first coffee has finished doing its work, one short email arrives. It takes about three minutes to read. By the end of it you will know one thing that astonishes you, four things that delight you, one thing you can stop believing, one question that will stump your whole household, and one thing that happened this very week in some other century.
That's the whole deal. It has been the whole deal since 2003, and Frank sees no reason to fix what isn't broken.
📬 What's Inside Every Issue
| Section | What you get |
|---|---|
| 🥇 The Headliner | The single most astonishing fact Frank verified this week — plus the full story behind it, because a great fact deserves more than one sentence. |
| 🔢 Four More Beauties | Four rapid-fire facts from four different shelves of the library: animals, space, history, food, words, numbers — Frank mixes it up. |
| 🚫 The Weekly Debunk | One famous "fact" that everyone repeats and nobody checked. Frank checked. It's toast. |
| ❓ Frank's Stumper | A trivia question to try on your family over dinner. The answer arrives in the next issue — no peeking allowed. |
| 📅 This Week in History | Something remarkable that happened this very calendar week, once upon a time, with Frank's two cents attached. |
Not sure? You don't have to take anyone's word for it — read six complete sample issues in the archive first. Kick the tires. Frank encourages tire-kicking; it's practically his verification method.
🆓 Why Is It Free?
Three reasons, in Frank's own ordering:
- Facts want to travel. A fact kept behind a tollbooth is a fact that loses arguments to a loud fellow with a laminated card. Frank has history with laminated cards (the full story is here).
- The bills are covered. A small number of hand-picked sponsors keep the lights on, and they get one polite line in the email — never a pop-up, never a gimmick, never your address. Frank does not sell the list. Frank barely lets the list out of the drawer.
- Stubbornness. The first issue in 2003 was free, so all of them are. Frank regards this as airtight reasoning.
💬 What the Readers Say
(Testimonials lightly polished by Frank, who notes that all enthusiasm is real even where the surnames are withheld.)
- "Undefeated at trivia night since March. The team calls me The Almanac now. I owe Frank everything." — Doris
- "I read it at the counter every Friday and by Saturday half the town has heard the headliner from me, slightly wrong." — Earl, who still owes Frank a coffee
- "My nephew used to check his phone at family dinners. Now he checks it to fact-check ME, and he loses." — Bill, age 71
- "I married into a family of know-it-alls. Frank's Five is my equalizer. Three minutes a week. Cheaper than lawyers." — Ramona
- "Best thing in my inbox. Admittedly the rest of my inbox is a warranty expiring, but still." — Gary
Already aboard? Forward Friday's issue to a friend — facts are free, and so is postage. ★