According to the Roman biographer Suetonius, the emperor Vespasian declined to use a labor-saving hoist in his construction projects. “To a mechanical engineer who promised to transport some heavy columns to the capitol at small expense, he gave no mean reward for his invention,” Suetonius writes, “but refused to make use of it, saying, ‘You must let me feed my poor commons.’ ”
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The Talmud tells of a third-century rabbi named Joseph who died, saw a heavenly paradise, returned to life, and told his father of a world to come that would be “the reverse of this one—those who are on top here were below there, and vice versa.” “My son,” said his father, “you have seen a corrected world.”
For publishing an editorial critical of John Adams’ Federalist administration in 1798, Vermont congressman Matthew Lyon became the first U.S. citizen tried under the Sedition Act. He was fined $1,000 and sentenced to four months in federal jail. He ran his reelection campaign from prison, winning by a two-to-one margin. He resumed his post upon release.
“Just opposite, an island of the sea, / There came enchantment with the shifting wind, / That did both drown and keep alive my ears,” wrote John Keats in Hyperion. It was published in a collection of poems in 1820; Keats died the following year. In 1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley, returning from a visit to Lord Byron, drowned after his schooner, the Don Juan, capsized. His body washed up on the Tuscan shore a few days later. In his pocket was a copy of Keats’ poems.
It is said that while campaigning in southern Louisiana, Huey Long was told that many voters were Catholic. “When I was a boy,” he began speeches, “I would get up at six o’clock in the morning on Sunday, and I would take my Catholic grandparents to mass. I would bring them home, and at ten o’clock I would hitch the old horse up again, and I would take my Baptist parents to church.” A colleague later said, “I didn’t know you had any Catholic grandparents.” To which he replied, “Don’t be a damned fool. We didn’t even have a horse.”
“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.”
“The ancient Roman class struggle was only fought out within a privileged minority,” wrote Karl Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed a purely passive pedestal for the combatants. People forget J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi’s significant expression: the Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat.”
According to a 2021 study published by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, “noninstructional spending” at universities is growing faster than “instructional spending”; between 2012 and 2018, “colleges and universities prioritized hiring less expensive and often less credentialed instructional staff and more expensive administrative staff.”
An estimated one in ten Europeans is conceived in an Ikea bed.
Gustav Mahler set five poems from Friedrich Rückert’s Songs on the Death of Children to music between 1901 and 1904. In that time he and his wife, Alma, had two children, the eldest of whom died in 1907. About the compositions, Mahler later said, “I placed myself in the situation that a child of mine had died. When I really lost my daughter, I could not have written these songs anymore.” He died in 1911, Alma not until 1964—having twice remarried, to Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius and then to author Franz Werfel.
For Kid Nation, a reality show that aired in 2007, forty children went to stay in a New Mexico ghost town for forty days. They lived as laborers, cooks, merchants, or an upper class; many worked fourteen-hour days to earn buffalo nickels to spend on root beer. In the final episode, some participants raided the dry goods store. “It’s free,” said one kid, his mouth stuffed with gummy bears. Another raider was heard announcing, “There is a god.”
A review of the sitcom The Hank McCune Show in a 1950 issue of Variety described the first known use of a laugh track on TV: “Although the show is lensed on film without a studio audience, there are chuckles and yucks dubbed in. Whether this induces a jovial mood in home viewers is still to be determined, but the practice may have unlimited possibilities if it’s spread to include canned peals of hilarity, thunderous ovations, and gasps of sympathy.”
Many medical experts disdain the widely circulated idea that adults need to drink eight glasses of water per day; most agree that solid foods alone provide enough hydration. Barbara Rolls, a nutrition researcher at Pennsylvania State University, was asked in 2001 about the origin of the spurious rule. “I can’t even tell you,” she said, “and I’ve written a book on water.”
After Mademoiselle Bertin became dressmaker to Marie Antoinette, “all wished instantly to have the same dress as the queen,” wrote lady-in-waiting Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Campan. “The expenditure of the younger ladies was necessarily much increased; mothers and husbands murmured at it; some few giddy women contracted debts; unpleasant domestic scenes occurred; several families either quarreled or grew cool among themselves; and the general report was that the queen would be the ruin of all the French ladies.”
In ancient Indian espionage networks, a sattri was an orphan-spy trained from youth in palmistry, magic, omens, and augury.