You don’t know who Nellie Bly is, do you? She pioneered investigative journalism.

— Sorkin Dialogue (@sorkinese) May 5, 2015

Google is celebrating Nellie Bly today with a little cartoony thing.  Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s has written a song in her honor, which is featured in the lovely Google Doodle created by artist Katy Wu.

Why Nellie Bly?  Today is here 151st birthday.

On the chance that you don’t know who Nellie Bly was, she was a pioneering female journalist many decades before women could even vote.   She was pretty bae.

In 1885, Bly wrote a furious letter to a Pittsburgh newspaper denouncing a column entitled, “What Girls Are Good For” that described the working woman as a “monstrosity” and said that women were best suited for domestic chores.  Impressed by Bly’s letter, Pittsburgh Dispatch editor George Madden hired her as a full-time reporter under the pen name Nellie Bly.  She was a trailblazing journalist, an unwavering champion for women and the working poor, and a brilliant muckracker. One of her most famous assignments was for the the New York Worldwhere she posed as a mentally ill woman and exposed the horrors of a women’s asylum on Blackwell’s Island, as depicted here by Laura Dern in Drunk History:

Bly also achieved worldwide fame with her 1889 trip around the world, which was inspired by Jules Verne’s novel “Around the World in Eighty Days.” She completed her journey in seventy-two days, becoming the first woman to beat a fictional world record for global circumnavigation.  Okay, maybe that isn’t her biggest accomplishment.