Things most people know about Nellie Bly: She has a funny name.

Things I love about Nellie Bly:

• She went to Mexico to report on the people and their customs when she was 21. Twenty-one. That’s younger than me and probably younger than you and she went to rural Mexico in 1885 to do this shit for six months. And this was a time when women did the fashion pages for the papers and not much else.
• Then she went to New York because she was bored and pretended to be mad to get into a brutal women’s asylum so she could report from the inside. That’s some hardcore journalism in a time when conditions in those sorts of places were appalling. 

“My teeth chattered and my limbs were …numb with cold. Suddenly, I got three buckets of ice-cold water…one in my eyes, nose and mouth.”

• Then in 1888, presumably just to annoy Jules Verne, she went around the world. In 72 days. And had a stop over in France to meet Verne and presumably flip him the bird. 
• Then she married a millionaire. You literally couldn’t make this stuff up. 
• And then…just to confirm her position as a hardcore badass, she reported on the front. And not the Western Front, the Eastern front, where people were sent for ballsing up.