Long Story Short Play today

The archive

90 puzzles so far

Long Story Short gives you a sentence and asks you to cut it to five of its own words, keeping the meaning. Every past sentence is here with its answer and a note on which words were doing the work. A new one lands every day at midnight.

• A 72-year-old stroke survivor who had never swum in his life at first clung to the pool's side, but kept going back and in the end swam lengths.7 November 2026
• Still competing as a 103-year-old, an Australian who flew Spitfires in the war won bronze at a tennis championship on the Greek island of Crete last week.6 November 2026
• A grandmother, 85, was already outside her Benton Harbor home when firefighters arrived on Friday, because her grandson had pulled her through a window as the kitchen burned.5 November 2026
• After a mother and father screamed for help in a New Jersey parking lot, a teen's CPR, learned in a class two days earlier, saved their baby's life.4 November 2026
• Carrying a bucket of feed into a field down the road, women at a Stourbridge riding yard rescued the horses from a wildfire that burned it minutes later.3 November 2026
• Every school morning she sat in the dirt beside their driveway to catch the bus, so the teachers built the girl a bus-stop bench.2 November 2026
• Eight years after putting her clubs away, a 100-year-old champion golfer swings again on the same course where she won a state title in 1995.1 November 2026
• An avalanche in Alaska badly hurt two hikers; the dog with them, LouLou, spent two nights in the snow until pilots tracking her AirTag found her alive.31 October 2026
• The speed cameras at a crossroads in rural England are fake: after 11 crashes in four years, villagers knitted them, plus zebras and hi-vis for a dummy traffic cop.30 October 2026
• Across more than 5700 school districts, student phones quietly became classroom buzzers, and the old argument about who pressed first finally ended.29 October 2026
• While their mother fretted, a road-crew in New Zealand rescued ducklings one by one from a drain, with one man holding another's legs as he reached down.28 October 2026
• About three kilometres out in an Australian bay, a kangaroo was swimming when a fishing crew rescued it through their boat's sea door; back ashore, it hopped away.27 October 2026
• Using a pole camera, a Utah crew spotted a kitten underground but could not get it out, so the city sent in R2D2, which rescued it from the pipe.26 October 2026
• On the morning Winnie-the-Pooh turned 100, a black-bear got in at Mammoth Lakes, California, left the books alone and ate the library staff's honey, cookies and peanut butter.25 October 2026
• California's entire coast, about 900 miles from the Oregon border to Mexico, had never been swum until a Mill Valley woman swam it, starting in July.24 October 2026
• Novel-November from ProWritingAid helps new and experienced authors write 50k-words in 30 days, with inspirational speakers, live writing sprints, practical tools, and perks to build lasting habits.23 October 2026
• On a slow Friday afternoon last week, a teacher built a Factile Jeopardy game for the class review.22 October 2026
• At a New Zealand pub, fifty people barely looked up as the man at the piano played unnoticed, his face covered by the lid. It was Justin Bieber.21 October 2026
• Thirty years ago, on a delayed flight from Kansas City to Phoenix, a Minnesotan and a Nebraskan became seatmates and, two years on, got married.20 October 2026
• After an Irishman's wedding ring slipped off in a mountain stream, Italians he had never met spent days in the rapids, then went to Ireland to return it.19 October 2026
• When a teacher was turned down as a donor, his school's janitor volunteered, and the janitor's kidney, given to a stranger in a swap, saved the teacher's brother.18 October 2026
• Keaton Foster, a seven-year-old from Cochrane, Alberta, collected a million pop-tabs through a mailbox outside his home and turned the scrap into ten wheelchairs for children.17 October 2026
• Susan Gair, 104, of Glasgow, and her brother William, 86, the last surviving siblings, were reunited after 60 years apart, when William's daughter found an article about Susan's 100th birthday.16 October 2026
• A 24-year-old flew from Guernsey to race in Chicago alone, so an uncle secretly asked for help on Facebook, and strangers cheered his marathon along every mile.15 October 2026
• Economists Robert Hall of Stanford and Michael Woodford of Columbia University, both American, whose models help central banks fight inflation, won the highest prize in their field: the Nobel.14 October 2026
• Told in the Nuremberg courtroom that she had won the Nobel Peace-Prize, an 85-year-old judge from Durban thought it was a joke, then joked she might share it with Trump.13 October 2026
• Three years after their dog Desmond vanished at a Super Bowl party, his family found him at a Texas shelter, renamed Ash, and recognised him by a trick he knew.12 October 2026
• A father killed in the Jeju massacre had wished his eldest girl could read; that girl, now an 85-year-old woman, has learnt her letters and written him a poem.11 October 2026
• An 11-year-old who had learned from YouTube what to do saved a choking six-year-old boy at McDonald's by patting him on the back until a chicken nugget came out.10 October 2026
• Newly widowed, an 80-year-old with a walker was crossing an Arizona road in broken footwear when a teenager gave him the shoes off his feet, then bought him peanut M&M's.9 October 2026
• A neuroscientist won the Nobel for optogenetics, a way to switch single brain cells on and off with light and see what each one does.8 October 2026
• A police dog named Arch picked up a scent at a Colorado campsite and found three missing children a mile and a half into the wilderness, all unhurt.7 October 2026
• A fly-tip of bedding and bottles in an alley was cleared soon after becoming a work of art, arranged by a woman whose complaints had been ignored.6 October 2026
• Arsenal were three down when a fan stormed out of his house, and in the valley below he found a stranded woman, chest-deep in mud for four hours.5 October 2026
• A 100-year-old in Louisiana, losing his sight, gives away the handmade toys he still makes, more than a hundred this year, each a little wooden car.4 October 2026
• A 13-year-old whose previous longest swim had been 10km swam 64km from Dhanushkodi to Thalaimannar and back, spending eighteen hours and fifty minutes at sea.3 October 2026
• Gandhi is, in the phrase Bose first used on Azad Hind Radio in 1944, the man India's people have since called Father-of-the-Nation, though no government conferred it.2 October 2026
• Seventy volunteers took turns on the sand through the night and saved 229 of the baby turtles that the beach lights were pulling towards the road.1 October 2026
• Every Monday and Thursday, a 97-year-old in Milwaukee still runs the weights class he wrote for pensioners, and an 82-year-old he trained takes over this winter.30 September 2026
• At his last home game, a senior, born with Down-Syndrome, served as captain for the coin toss, took a handoff on the opening play and scored a touchdown.29 September 2026
• Anna Kingrey could not reach the hospital in time; her husband called 911, and firefighters, arriving after the police, helped deliver the baby outdoors.28 September 2026
• Cath Bowie, an Inverurie grandmother whose grandson said no one would watch her, became, at 78, the oldest-female Fortnite streamer, according to Guinness World Records.27 September 2026
• Printed on Christine Todd's T-shirt and worn at White Sox games for two years, a plea for a kidney found her donor: Chris Beck, a Virginia biology teacher.26 September 2026
• Pen-pals since a 1984 school assignment, Mike Rafferty, a South Philadelphia boxer-turned-cop, and Christie Leonard of Orangevale, California, finally met face-to-face Monday at Dean's Bar.25 September 2026
• A six-year-old broke the girls' Rubik's-Cube record twice in three days, with averages of four and a half and then four and a quarter seconds.24 September 2026
• A Marin center refused the owl John Murnane rescued because it was not a Marin resident, so he drove it ninety minutes himself, and it now keeps visiting his garden.23 September 2026
• John Hanson has now returned an illustrated magazine that was borrowed from Concord Public Library in 1894, soon after a yearlong freeze on overdue fines began.22 September 2026
• The kea's beak had split, leaving the alpine parrot unable to eat, and was rebuilt over 48 days with a gel hardened under an ultraviolet lamp.21 September 2026
• At Camden Lock, a 71-year-old woman, Beatrice Millar, took off her shoes, jumped in after a drowning man and saved him by holding his head above water.20 September 2026
• On Interstate 30 near Texarkana, Texas, Mitchell Royal pulled a woman from her burning pickup about thirty seconds before the whole cab was gone.19 September 2026
• In Vietnam, the family dog, Den, stayed beside a lost six-year-old overnight on a mountain 10 km from home until searchers found the pair at 9 am.18 September 2026
• Eight-year-old Kingsley Espitia jumped into Bass Lake fully clothed and pulled a three-year-old from the water, and this week, the Otter Tail County sheriff gave him an award.17 September 2026
• Troy police formed a human chain down the seawall and rescued both the eight-year-old in the Hudson River and the neighbor who went in after her.16 September 2026
• So that siblings in foster care can stay together, Christian Bale opened a 12-home village built around a garden in Palmdale, California.15 September 2026
• Tommy Price was on a 66-mile run in 2022 when a cardiac-arrest dropped him face down in the snow with no pulse, and four years later the survivor finished the same route.14 September 2026
• Having sworn, after the Reddit post, never to write about him publicly again, the mortified Yale woman submitted an anonymous birthday story about the observant naval officer instead.13 September 2026
• After sending him off in an ambulance, Oklahoma City firefighters mowed the rest of the sick man's lawn, since he had only got halfway before he fell ill.12 September 2026
• Just after noon a Cook County landfill supervisor stood over the motionless bald eagle, certain the bird was dead, until its poop proved it alive.11 September 2026
• Tyler Richards, a fourth-grader in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, spent the summer collecting cans and bottles and raised 2300 dollars for a new playground at his school.10 September 2026
• Weldon Bowen, a Marine veteran who turned a hundred on Saturday in Tyler, received over 4000 birthday cards after the state of Texas requested 100.9 September 2026
• Karl Wenner turned 70 acres of his barley farm near Klamath Falls into a wetland, home now to 140 bird species and twenty thousand ducks.8 September 2026
• Tacoma's Point Defiance Zoo opened in 1905, and on 17 August 2026 it welcomed its first porcupette in 121 years, a baby prehensile-tailed porcupine called a coendou.7 September 2026
• Thin and unwell near Nakanocho Station last October, an apprentice by January, the stray cat nursed by Choshi railway staff was promoted in May to full stationmaster.6 September 2026
• A Seattle dog called Eclipse rode the bus alone to the park, a few stops off, in a red harness, with her own pass on her collar.5 September 2026
• Pushing the freezer aside with his trunk, a wild elephant raided a small shop near Thailand's Khao Yai park for sweets, eating ten bags in ten minutes.4 September 2026
• After a call from an Ohio church, a friendly pygmy goat rode to the county fair in the back seat of a police cruiser.3 September 2026
• 91-year-old Dale Sanders, known as Grey Beard, finished the Appalachian Trail, the oldest ever to do it.2 September 2026
• After a prank order of pizzas in Wyoming, one pizzeria owner gives the whole lot to the ER.1 September 2026
• After twenty-three years of renting, tenant Jane inherited her retired pharmacist landlord's Melbourne unit.31 August 2026
• On 27th August, Greece celebrates the feast of its lost-things saint, Phanourios, who is asked for everything from keys to estranged partners to courage.30 August 2026
• Rex, a wobbly four-month-old kitten who never could walk, gets in the wheelchair Michael Hawley built him from Lego.29 August 2026
• Little Skyler, at seven years old, wears fifty sweaters, all at once, for a Guinness world record.28 August 2026
• In thirty years at an Ohio children's hospital, one surgeon draws ten thousand cartoons on little bandages.27 August 2026
• After four straight weekends on top and two billion dollars of tickets, Tom Holland's Spider-Man now nears Titanic.26 August 2026
• From Wellfleet in November to a Coney Island afternoon eight months later, turtle Pancake rejoins the Atlantic.25 August 2026
• LEGO has recreated Barcelona's Sagrada Familia basilica in bricks, its biggest ever.24 August 2026
• At D23, Disney World finally confirmed it is building Villains Land, an area for its baddest characters.23 August 2026
• Help! Lyft charged me $150 for vomiting in a car, but I didn't do it.22 August 2026
• After DNA tests exposed mislabeling, Georgia restaurants now disclose imported shrimp on menus.21 August 2026
• Johnny Depp is discussing a return as Captain Jack Sparrow in a sixth Pirates of the Caribbean.20 August 2026
• This weekend the Beatles film recreated Abbey Road, actors walking the famous zebra crossing for the cover.19 August 2026
• The stolen school piano was returned because a caretaker recognised it in a junk shop.18 August 2026
• The last giant sundaes were licked by thirty cheering children after the van broke down.17 August 2026
• Volunteers, not the council, reopened the railway line that collapsed in March.16 August 2026
• Overnight parking was allowed on every street until the mayor banned it.15 August 2026
• The damaged cargo plane landed safely because one pilot ignored panicked controllers.14 August 2026
• Guards searching nine dockside warehouses finally recovered the six stolen bronze statues.13 August 2026
• One judge, deliberating late and alone, delayed the famous high profile trial.12 August 2026
• Furious unions, calling the terms an insult, rejected all final contract offers.11 August 2026
• Brown flood water, rising within ten minutes, ruined the entire ground floor.10 August 2026

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