Pearson, left, and Hattikudur, co-founders: "Everybody wants to be smart. But nobody wants to work at it." Photo: Beau Gustafson

ill Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur know your dirty little secret: You know that you don't know as much as you think other people think you should know.

Don't worry; they're not going to expose your intellectual shortcomings to public ridicule. To the contrary, these 2001 Duke graduates and co-founders of mental_floss magazine want to help.

First, a few cerebral calisthenics:

1. Why did a 1937 children's play about water-loving rodents provoke members of Congress to kill a Depression-era work program for unemployed theater professionals?
2. What element was isolated for the first time during a 1669 experiment to make gold from putrefied urine?
3. Who did so poorly in boarding school that his father accused him of caring about "nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat catching" and fretted that the boy would disgrace the family name?

Stumped? Maybe it's time you joined the nearly 60,000 readers who turn to mental_floss magazine every other month for a treasure trove of brainy facts, academic minutiae, and conversation toppers they never learned in high school or college (but maybe would have if they'd been paying more attention in class).

If you'd thumbed through a recent copy of the magazine, you would have learned that:

1. Members of Congress responded to the thinly veiled Communist ideals espoused in The Revolt of the Beavers in 1939 by killing President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Federal Theatre Project (and set a sixty-five-year precedent for anemic government funding of the American theater).
2. German alchemist Hennig Brand boiled the urine to a paste, heated the paste to draw out the vapors into water, and found a waxy, glow-in-the-dark substance now called phosphorus--and commonly added to multivitamins.
3. Charles Darwin was a bit of a late bloomer.

As the tag line on every mental_floss cover says: Feel smart again.

"People like to be well informed," says Pearson. "People like to know a little about almost anything. At the same time, there's so much out there, there's no way to learn everything."

Hattikudur puts a slightly different spin on it. "Everybody wants to be smart," he says. "But nobody wants to work at it."

That's where mental_floss comes in--offering chunks of predigested information about myriad topics in a cheeky style that deliberately mixes education and fun. The publication may lack the name recognition, ad pages, and circulation figures of Newsweek, People, or Vanity Fair, but it shares the same magazine racks in Barnes & Noble, Borders, Wal-Mart, and Books-A-Million.

Pearson fondly describes his publication as "Mad magazine meets Smithsonian." The magazine's third annual "10 Issue," published last spring, hopscotched from snippets about rebellious teens getting voluntary amputations and Ben Franklin's predilection for nude "air baths" to articles about the "10 Movies That Changed the World," "10 Things That Aren't Boring About Chemistry," and "The Not-So-American History of Our National Anthem."

"You skim it," Hattikudur explains. "If you have five minutes, you can pick up something to use at a cocktail party."

The magazine even takes a crack at answering some of the truly big mysteries of life. For example, "Are green M&Ms really an aphrodisiac?" That's an urban legend, according to mental_floss writer Kelly Ferguson. But two chemicals in chocolate--and thus, every color of M&Ms--do cause symptoms that correspond to feeling "in love," she says. Phenylethylamine elevates heart rates, increases energy, and creates a sense of euphoria; anandamide is a neurotransmitter that works on the brain in essentially the same way as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), a chemical found in marijuana.

The eclectic mixture of oddball items has attracted a surprisingly large amount of media buzz. Write-ups and interviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Times ("like Reader's Digest as penned by Jeopardy! writers"), The Chicago Tribune ("For the discerning intellect, mental_floss cleans out the cobwebs"), Reader's Digest ("Read once a day for a minty-fresh mind"), National Public Radio, CNN, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, and Newsweek magazine (twice).

And in two episodes of the NBC comedy hit Friends, Monica, the character played by actress Courtney Cox, was spotted thumbing through mental_floss while she sat in a doctor's waiting room.

Mental_floss offers "to the contemporary mind, adrift in the sea of random data unleashed by the Internet ... the kind of fact you want from a magazine--the kind that snaps you awake in the middle of a plane ride with its staggering insignificance, the kind that by its total absence of context is guaranteed to stay lodged forever in your brain, impressing future dates," wrote Newsweek senior editor Jerry Adler in a recent article that carried the headline "The Titans of Trivia" and featured a photo of Pearson.