Just So Stories
by Rudyard Kipling · first published 1922
13mentions
2recommended by
13HN commenters
2010–2026first – last mentioned
15% recommend69% neutral15% critical
Seven tales that explain special things about animals, such as how the whale got his tiny throat, the camel his hump and the leopard his spots.
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…Classic) - Really good read and not that long of a book. 4.5/5. Apollo 8 by Jeffrey Kluger - As the title implies, it's about the Apollo 8 mission. Same guy who wrote the biography on Neil Armstrong. 3/5. Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling - Charming short stories that Kipling told his daughter until she died. 3.5/5 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain - Was assigned this in high school but didn't read it then.…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?” ↗…O'Brian - Arthur Conan Doyle - Dorothy Dunnet I'd recommend Rudyard Kipling's short stories, but they're hit and miss, and sometimes out of step with modern mores. Maybe stick with the Jungle Book, and Just So Stories, and if you like those make sure you read Without Benefit of Clergy, They (short stories), and Kim (a masterpiece of a novel). Once you've got through those, Hemingway is approachable, and the true modernist…
on “Maybe the Default Settings Are Too High” ↗…explanation slots into a space we don't know much about and defends itself with "it's possible and it makes sense", but its strengths are almost always narrative rather than factual. Like Kipling's actual Just-So Stories, they're interesting and memorable, but very dissimilar to the histories we actually know. (As far as why this specific example qualifies, it's basically impossible to falsify the story, yet it's badly…
on “Wolf Pups That Play Fetch” ↗I was looking for a copy of "Just So Stories" by Rudyard Kipling. Knew I wasn't going to get anything like the original publication of a 115 year old book, but the counterfeiter exceeded my expectations and sent me a badly photocopied, horribly…
on “Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW” ↗…story material but it seems an over-reach to ask Scroll kit to remove a reference to them in their description. That last bit seems like fair use. If I write a book "in the style of Rudyard Kipling's 'Just So Stories'" by what reasoning would the Kipling estate ownership of that style?
on “The New York Times Told Me To Take This Down” ↗…use anyway, if X, Y and Z. Facts and factual statements are not copyrightable in the US in the first place. Nor does copyright, in the US, prevent someone from comparing something to Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. So you are correct that there is no legal basis under copyright to prevent such a comparison, but it's not about fair use.
on “The New York Times Told Me To Take This Down” ↗…anyway, if X, Y and Z. > Facts and factual statements are not copyrightable in the US in the first place. Nor does copyright, in the US, prevent someone from comparing something to Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. So you are correct that there is no legal basis under copyright to prevent such a comparison, but it's not about fair use. This is simply incorrect: I wish you'd stop replying to everyone who mentions…
on “The New York Times Told Me To Take This Down” ↗…based on a weak study on the color preferences of a small handful of women. Evolutionary Psychology is not an excuse to invent vaguely plausible evolutionary explanations and call them scientific. (The Just So Stories are Rudyard Kipling's Lamarckian fantasy tales of how creatures attained their present form.)
It's a bit disappointing that "How the Giraffe Got His Neck" didn't make it into Kipling's Just So Stories (http://www.boop.org/jan/justso/)
on “How Necking Shaped the Giraffe” ↗These are often called "Just So Stories" after Kipling's book for that very reason. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_So_Stories#Evolutionary_d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story
on “Why on Earth are flowers beautiful? (2018)” ↗That wasn’t in my copy of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories.” A little more seriously, that sounds like a behavior that would be beneficial for many creatures, and yet only a few do anything like that. If it were effective, it’d be common.
on “Our bacteria are more personal than we thought, new study shows” ↗Indeed, they have all the intellectual rigour of Kipling's Just So Stories, and should be treated with as much seriousness.
on “Your brain was never designed for this much bad news” ↗You'll hate Kipling's Just So Stories then.
on “Volcanoes, plague, famine and endless winter: Welcome to 536” ↗