Roman architect Vitruvius hated the first-century-bc design trend of walls painted with fantastic images. “On the stucco are monsters,” he wrote of a house whose walls also showed plant stalks and candelabra painted to mimic structural supports. “Such things neither are, nor can be, nor have been,” he complained. “The new fashions compel bad judges to condemn good craftsmanship for dullness.”
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The longest filibuster in U.S. Senate history lasted twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes, a record set in 1957 by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina to stall passage of the Civil Rights Act. Thurmond died in 2003, holding his same Senate seat.
Tacitus reports in his Annals that Nero’s “passion for extravagance” brought disrepute and danger in the year 60 when the emperor went bathing in the spring that fed the Aqua Marcia, the aqueduct believed to deliver Rome’s healthiest drinking water. Nero “profaned the sacred waters,” complains Tacitus, and “the divine anger was confirmed by a grave illness that followed.”
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.
Irving Berlin composed most of his songs in F-sharp major; the six sharp notes in the scale meant he could play the black keys of the piano almost exclusively. Eventually, for purposes of technical variety, he had a lever mechanism installed that allowed him to modulate into other keys without changing his playing.
A temperance movement “Anti-Saloon Battle Hymn” from 1907 describes the saloon as an “awful, unspeakable monster” that “makes millions of widows and orphans, / and drunkards of millions of men” and asks that “from its shackles, O God, do thou free us, / and for freedom we ever will stand.” In 1914 the song “Emancipation” pleaded for “not one slave” of alcohol to remain in this nation of “true liberty so grand.”
Between 1959 and 1962 in China, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward increased industrial growth at the expense of agricultural output. More than 45 million people perished from famine and disease, as well as from floods, droughts, and locusts.
A 2013 study involving American college students found that participants were more likely to deem a face more attractive if it was presented amid a group of faces than if it was displayed alone. This “cheerleader effect,” scientists ventured, was “due to the averaging out of unattractive idiosyncrasies.” Two years later a similar study conducted with Japanese participants failed to replicate the results of the initial study.
In 1999 an Inuit organization complained that representatives from Donna Karan International had come to the Canadian Arctic and paid between $10,000 and $15,000 for handmade Inuit clothing. “They went to the bar up in Yellowknife,” the group told the Ottawa Citizen, “and people just sold them their clothes.” Items purchased later appeared in Donna Karan’s Madison Avenue store.
When a former leader of the Tijuana cartel was shot in the back of the head by a man dressed in a clown costume, five hundred clowns from around Latin America joined together at the International Clown Meeting in Mexico City and staged a fifteen-minute laughathon “to demonstrate their opposition to the generalized violence that prevails in our country.”
“When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west,” said the Apache leader Cochise, “and saw no other people than the Apaches. After many summers I walked again and found another race of people had come to take it.”
When told by a doctor that he was dying in 1851, J.M.W. Turner replied, “Go downstairs, take a glass of sherry, and then look at me again.” The doctor followed the painter’s suggestion but returned with the same prognosis. The day Turner died he was wheeled to the window so that he could see the sunshine on the river and boats passing by.
Twenty-two-year-old critic Richard Goldstein savaged the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in a New York Times review when the album was released in 1967, calling it “busy, hip, and cluttered.” He later admitted the stereo he’d heard it on had a busted left speaker, but he remained unapologetic: “What can I say? If you’re not embarrassed by your youth, what good are you?”
Shortly after her ex-husband Louis Calhern married Julia Hoyt, the novelist and actress Ilka Chase found a set of visiting cards with the name “Mrs. Louis Calhern” on them. “They were the best cards—thin, flexible parchment, highly embossed,” Chase recalled, “and it seemed a pity to waste them, and so I mailed the box to my successor. But aware of Lou’s mercurial marital habits, I wrote on the top one, ‘Dear Julia, I hope these reach you in time.’ I received no acknowledgment.”
Researchers at Yale and UC San Diego found that among a sample of almost two thousand subjects, none of them related, pairs of friends were significantly more likely to share gene variants than pairs of strangers; on average, close friends were the genetic equivalent of fourth cousins, making them “functional kin.” “Not only do we form ties with people superficially like ourselves,” said sociologist Nicholas Christakis, one of the study’s authors, “we form ties with people who are like us on a deep genetic level.”