Before Inuit tribes in southeastern Alaska would offer hospitality, anthropologist Franz Boas noted, a stranger would have to exchange blows to the head with a tribesman until one combatant was “vanquished.” In other areas, men would strip down and arm wrestle, sometimes to the death. The Inuit understanding: “The two men in meeting wish to know which of them is the better man.”
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A seventh-century Chinese treatise declares after “careful investigation” that “there are but thirty main positions for consummating the sexual union.” These include Bamboos Near the Altar, Reversed Flying Ducks, Phoenix Holding Its Chicken, Cat and Mouse in One Hole, and Donkeys in the Third Moon of Spring. “The understanding reader,” it concludes, will “probe their wonderful meaning to its very depth.”
In his catalogue of the world’s people in his Natural History, Pliny the Elder mentioned Scythians who feed on human flesh, Africans who “are frequently seen to all appearance and then vanish in an instant,” the Arimaspi who have only one eye, the Adrogyni who possess male and female parts, and the Monocoli who are born with “only one leg, but are able to leap with surprising agility.”
“Don’t take mother’s milk—it’s for young calves,” reads a medieval poem by the blind ascetic al-Maarri, “or thick white honey…the bees didn’t make it just to give it away!” In al-Maarri’s Epistle of the Horse and the Mule, the titular horse complains of “torture from the sons of Eve” and Bedouins’ cruelty toward the “tribes of equus”: “Our lot is to have hardships thrown around our necks and heaped onto our backs!”
At the start of the French Revolution, the physician Jean-Paul Marat began publishing an antimonarchical journal in which he called the king’s minister of finance “the cruelest adversary of freedom.” In 1790 the Marquis de Lafayette dispatched thousands of soldiers to arrest Marat, even stationing them on rooftops in case Marat, an aviation enthusiast, attempted to escape by balloon. While the legality of the warrant was being disputed, Marat wrote and published a pamphlet mocking these extravagant efforts before making a quiet escape.
In the Texas border town of Lajitas, generations of goats named Clay Henry have since 1986 served as mayor from a pen outside the general store, where passersby often stop to give them beer. In 2001 a local man became envious that Clay Henry III was allowed to drink alcohol on Sunday in the blue law–abiding county. “The next morning,” the local sheriff reported, “the goat was found lying with its testicles cut off.”
Thomas Aquinas was so absorbed in solving a philosophical problem while dining with Louis IX around 1269 that he believed himself to be in his own office; when the solution came to him, he slapped the table and called to his secretary—who was not present—to get ready to write. The king, “amazed and edified that a man’s mind could be so enraptured by the spirit that none of the body’s senses could disturb it,” summoned a scribe to record the revelation.
When asked why he didn’t use intelligence agents, Alp Arslan, sultan of the Seljuq Empire in the 1060s, replied that his favored subjects would trust the spies, while his opponents would curry favor and bribe them; he’d end up hearing damaging reports about his friends and positive ones about his enemies. “Reports good and bad are like arrows,” Arslan said. “If you shoot enough of them, at least one will hit the target.”
Advocating in 1790 for the adoption of card catalogues, the German librarian Albrecht Christoph Kayser cited the “common mistake of employees that they believe they will live forever.” Workers “arrange their shops without regard for their successors, considering them well kept in their own memory, without written notes, thus making it impossible for those eventually taking their place, or at least making it infinitely more complicated for anyone to pick up the thread of those who have been called to meet their maker.”
Roman physician Galen recounted a debate from which a medical rival “departed in a big hurry, knowing, I imagine, that if he remained he would be proved wrong.” Galen then wrote a book to be delivered to the rival’s followers. “You walked away,” it reads, “behaving like an athletic competitor who seizes the crown and flees before the contest; but today you will not escape refutation, for this book will follow you.”
In 1864, responding to his friend Victor Hugo’s invitation to visit Guernsey, where the writer was living in exile, the French painter Gustave Courbet wrote, “In your sympathetic retreat I will contemplate the spectacle of your sea. The viewpoints of our mountains also offer us the limitless spectacle of immensity. The unfillable void has a calming effect. I confess, poet, I love terra firma and the orchestration of the countless herds that inhabit our mountains. The sea! The sea with its charms saddens me. In its joyful moods, it makes me think of a laughing tiger; in its sad moods, it recalls the crocodile’s tears and, in its roaring fury, the caged monster that cannot swallow me up.”
Poet Edward Fairfax kept a 1621 account of his daughter Helen’s terrible nightmares, describing an incident in which she complained about a demonic white cat that “has been long upon me and drawn my breath.” The cat, she said, “has left in my mouth and throat so filthy a smell that it does poison me.”
In the Arabian Nights, Shahrazad tells of a merman who guides a fisherman around the ocean floor, where underwater societies shun clothing, commerce, and religious restrictions. “I have seen enough,” the fisherman says after eighty days, “for I am getting tired of eating fish.”
A seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary to China once related a story about a Nanjing man who sued a local deity, his case being that the god had accepted his sacrifices but failed to save his ailing daughter and so must be either impotent or malicious. District officials balked but referred the case to the imperial court in Beijing, which ruled against the deity—declaring it officially useless, exiling its cult statue, and ordering its monastery be destroyed.
In October 2021 U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo tweeted that “parents should decide what their children are taught in schools.” One user responded, “Why even have teachers?” and another, “Why send children to school at all?” A third user quipped, “I think teachers should decide what surgeries people need to have.”