One of the earliest known instances of wild carnivores being held in captivity in Mesoamerica dates to around the second century in Teotihuacán; excavations starting in the late 1990s uncovered the remains of almost two hundred animals—including wolves, eagles, and jaguars—in the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. The skeletons showed bone breaks, bone fusion, and abnormal growths, as well as indications of a human-controlled diet.
Archive
Miscellany
“I went sailing up to Great Point, which is fourteen miles. It was fine and rough so we went out in the open ocean and shipped water grandly. I have bought a large swordfish sword for the agassiz of an old salt by the name of Judas,” Ernest Hemingway wrote to his brother Marcelline in one of his earliest known letters, shortly after his eleventh birthday, in 1910.
“Where were you last night?” Yvonne asks Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, in Casablanca. “That’s so long ago, I don’t remember.” Her follow-up: “Will I see you tonight?” To which he replies, “I never make plans that far ahead.”
Around 14,500 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, the collapse of a large chunk of ice, likely from the Laurentide Ice Sheet covering North America, initiated an event known as Meltwater Pulse 1A. Sea levels rose more than a foot—and more than a mile of coast disappeared—per decade, displacing those living near shorelines. The earth’s human population was then roughly three million, 0.04 percent of what it is today.
Even before Jeremy Bentham wrote his own treatise on utilitarianism, Enlightenment scholars were attempting to quantify a happy life. In the eighteenth century, Glasgow professor Francis Hutcheson offered an equation for benevolence, defined as the desire to spread happiness to others, where b = benevolence, a = ability, s = self-love, i = interest, and m = moment of good. His formula: ba = m + sa = m + i, and therefore b = (m + i)/a.
“Have you eaten a body scab to gain health, or have you drunk a solution of those little worms called lice, or drunk human urine, or eaten any feces to gain health?” asks Burchard of Worms’ collection of canon law, compiled around 1008. “If you have, you should do penance for ten days on bread and water.”
Ottoman humorist Yusuf al-Shirbini of Egypt railed against unfair levies, referring to them as “things being called innovation.” Al-Shirbini quoted scripture: one who brings about “an innovation or provides accommodation for an innovator, upon him be the curse of God.”
“It was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote of his failed 1965 master’s thesis in anthropology, in which he argued that the plots of stories, when graphed, conform to a set of standard patterns. “The apathy of the University of Chicago is repulsive to me. They can take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooooooon.”
Taiwanese regulators fined the Chang Guann Company in 2014 for selling 645 tons of so-called gutter oil—cooking oil illegally recycled from restaurant waste and animal by-products—and distributing it to more than 1,200 restaurants, schools, and food processors. The adulterated product showed up in instant noodles, cakes, dumplings, and canned pork.
“Pubic grooming has led to a severe depletion of crab-louse populations,” a medical entomologist with the company Insect Research & Development Ltd. said in an interview in January of this year. “Add to that other aspects of body-hair depilation, and you can see an environmental disaster in the making for this species.” More than 80 percent of college students in the U.S. remove all or part of their pubic hair.
A special committee of the U.S. House of Representatives asked Lewis W. Leeds, a ventilation engineer and prominent critic of the popular belief that night air is inherently harmful to humans, to assess air quality inside the Capitol in 1868. The resulting report concluded that the House Chamber “is really the foulest place in the whole building,” with vents “so choked up with tobacco spittal and sweepings of the floor as to render the air rising from them very disagreeable.”
“People think this pandemic is an accident,” wrote Nassim Nicholas Taleb in May 2020 of the Covid-19 crisis. “It is not. It is part of the system we have built. When you read the history of England, Italy, and the Middle East, you read of frequent quarantines and lockdowns because of sieges and plagues. These were built into the economic landscape and into the costs of every merchant. So the cost of the pandemic and future pandemics should be set against gross domestic product figures. We must realize our real economic growth is much lower than our annual figures suggest because the disasters wipe out the growth of preceding years.”
It is said that a visitor once came to the home of Nobel Prize–winning physicist Niels Bohr and, having noticed a horseshoe hung above the entrance, asked incredulously if the professor believed horseshoes brought good luck. “No,” Bohr replied, “but I am told that they bring luck even to those who do not believe in them.”
When journalist Peter Andrey Smith attended the 2017 World Happiness Summit in Miami, he asked everyone he met, “Who’s the happiest person here?” Many, he reported, pointed to themselves and said, “Me.”
A thirteenth-century Song dynasty text about commerce describes dangers faced by pearl divers, who sometimes fell prey to “huge fishes, dragons, and other sea monsters” that would rip open their stomachs or bite off their feet. A pearl was considered most valuable if perfectly round; the test was “that it will not cease rolling about all day when put on a plate.” To avoid heavy export duties, foreign traders sometimes concealed pearls in canes or umbrella handles.