In August 2018 data scientist David Bamman examined how authors recently interviewed in the New York Times’ By the Book column answered the question “What’s on your nightstand?” Women mentioned male and female authors almost equally; men mentioned male authors more than 79 percent of the time. “Don’t read in bed,” advised Fran Lebowitz. “It’s too stimulating. Watch TV instead. It’s boring.”
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In one of the earliest references to the tragedy of the commons—a concept that describes how people use natural resources to their advantage without considering the cost to society—the economist William Forster Lloyd asked in 1833, “Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so bare-worn and cropped so differently from adjoining enclosures?”
Greek dramatist Aristophanes, in the 423 bc comedy The Clouds, coined the term rhaphanidosis, “the humiliating act of thrusting a radish up the anus as a punishment for adultery.”
In September 1776, fearing illness from night air, John Adams asked Benjamin Franklin to close the window of their room in a New Jersey inn. “I believe you are not acquainted with my Theory of Colds,” Franklin responded, launching into “a harangue upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration” in favor of leaving windows open. “I was so much amused,” Adams wrote in his journal, “that I soon fell asleep and left him and his philosophy together.”
According to medieval Egyptian scholar al-Nuwayri, the ancient sages claimed that “when lovers breathe into each other’s faces, their breath mixes with the air,” is inhaled through their noses, and then “reaches the brain, into which it spreads like light in a crystal vessel.”
Color film in the 1950s barely registered dark skin tones; Kodak had developed the product to measure images against the white skin of a model known as Shirley. The company eventually modified its film emulsion, responding to complaints from advertisers promoting wood furniture and chocolate.
On July 13, 1793, a Girondist young woman stabbed to death the Montagnard Jean-Paul Marat, editor of The Friend of the People. The state funeral was arranged by Jacques-Louis David, who soon afterward painted his Death of Marat; every member of the National Convention came, and the Marquis de Sade delivered the eulogy.
Around 1500 bc, the Hittite augur Maddunani sacrificed to the gods one goat kid, one piglet, and one puppy in an attempt to end an epidemic that had devastated the army. While puppies played “an extensive, and apparently vital” role in Hittite ritual, wrote historian Billie Jean Collins, “this is the only case in Hittite ritual of puppies being killed as an offering.”
Amphetamine salts became popular among soldiers during World War II as a stimulant to counteract fatigue. One study estimates that up to sixteen million Americans had been exposed to Benzedrine by the end of the war. Civilian use increased rapidly after that, especially among upper-middle-class women, who used the drug for appetite suppression and as an antidepressant. In 1962 the pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline & French ran an advertisement targeted toward physicians and featuring a photograph of a female patient. “With your encouragement and Dexedrine Spansule,” the ad proclaims, “she’s losing weight.”
“There is a dockyard at Woolwich where one hundred warships of all sizes are built yearly to replace ships lost to the enemy or which have become obsolete. Because of the high costs of armaments and machinery, the government is usually in debt and forced to borrow from the public,” observed Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, a Persian ambassador on a diplomatic visit to London in 1810.
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow attended Bowdoin College—both class of 1825—at the same time as Franklin Pierce, who was a year ahead of them. The fourteenth president of the United States was at Hawthorne’s side when the author died in 1864. Longfellow served as a pallbearer at the funeral.
After the Jacobites were defeated in 1746, a sympathizer named Flora Macdonald disguised Bonnie Prince Charlie as an Irish maid, smuggled him to her home on the Isle of Skye, and helped him escape to France. She then “took the sheets in which he had lain,” James Boswell later reported, “charged her daughter that they should be kept unwashed,” and asked to be buried in them as a shroud. She was.
In his Muqaddimah, the fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun describes talismans that make use of “the loving numbers” 220 and 284 to create the perfect union between friends or lovers. Two effigies are created, and the larger number is placed on the effigy of “the person whose friendship is sought.” The result of this “magical operation,” he explains, is a connection between the two such that “one is hardly able to break away from the other.”
A greenish-brown, diamond-twill, boat-neck wool sweater woven between 230 and 380 and worn by a reindeer hunter was discovered by researchers in 2013. The tunic, which was mended with two patches, had been preserved in the Norwegian Lendbreen glacier and would have fit a slender man of about 5'9". “The hunter,” said researcher Lise Bender Jørgensen, “looked after his clothing.”
John Florio’s 1603 translation of Michel de Montaigne’s essays contains an early instance of the word emotion being used to refer to feelings distinct from reasoning. Unsure of the word’s merits, Florio included it on a list of “uncouth termes” he apologized to readers for introducing into English from the French.