At thirty-one ounces, the Trenta, a new drink size introduced by Starbucks in 2011, holds the same volume as the average capacity of the human stomach.
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In 1840 Mikhail Lermontov published his only novel, A Hero of Our Time, in which the protagonist, Pechorin, kills a fellow officer in a duel in the Caucasus. A year later, Lermontov wrote in a poem, “In noon’s heat, in a dale of Dagestan / With lead inside my breast, stirless I lay; / The deep wound still smoked on.” Within a few months, Lermontov was dead, killed in a duel with a fellow officer in the Caucasus, shot through the heart after firing his own gun into the air.
“His method was inefficient in the extreme,” scoffed Nikola Tesla in 1931 in a New York Times obituary for his former employer and longtime scientific competitor, Thomas Edison. “In view of this, the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of miracle.”
Emily and Charlotte Brontë, insomniacs both, would walk together in circles around the dining room table until they were tired enough to sleep. When Emily died and Charlotte suffered alone, her insomnia worsened; she added to her route, often wandering down neighborhood streets and into the cemetery until daybreak.
James Boswell recorded that during the sale of Henry Thrale’s brewery, Samuel Johnson—an executor of the business—“appeared bustling about, with an inkhorn and pen in his buttonhole, like an exciseman,” and was asked what he considered to be the true value of the property. “We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats,” Johnson responded, “but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”
Paul Cézanne’s father, a banker, was fond of telling his son, “Young man, young man, think of the future! With genius you die, with money you live.” At least this is according to Émile Zola, who recalled the words of admonishment in one of his letters to his friend Paul. The two had first met as teenagers at boarding school in the 1850s.
Crested ducks are known to perform acts of cannibalism, mallards acts of necrophilia.
In 1610, in the harbor of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Richard Whitbourne saw a “strange creature” that was “beautiful” and had “blue streaks resembling hair” and a “hinder part” that pointed “like a broad-hooked arrow.” When it attempted to climb into his boat, one of his men “struck it full blow on the head, whereby it fell off from them.” He supposed that it was a mermaid. Two years earlier, while aboard a ship near Norway, Henry Hudson reported that “one of our company, looking overboard, saw a mermaid,” as her “back and breasts were like a woman’s,” “her skin very white,” and her tail “like the tail of a porpoise, and speckled like mackerel.”
A riot erupted in Constantinople in 532 that forced Justinian and his advisers to consider fleeing. Procopius wrote in History of the Wars that the emperor’s wife, Theodora—the only time in the work in which she speaks—told her husband, “If now it is your wish to save yourself, O Emperor, there is no difficulty.” On hand, she noted, were money and boats. “For myself,” she went on, “I approve a certain ancient saying that royalty is a good burial shroud.” Justinian stayed, put down the revolt, and in the ashes of the city’s old church built the still-standing Hagia Sophia.
Observing Mars through his telescope in 1877, Milanese astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli saw oceans and canali, meaning channels. The latter was mistranslated into English as canals, implying Martian-made waterways, and an amateur astronomer named Percival Lowell soon began publishing books pointing to these as evidence of life on Mars. By 1910 photographic technology had advanced sufficiently to debunk his extrapolated theories.
In 2014 the Federal Trade Commission charged the operator of Jerk.com with improperly obtaining personal information from Facebook to create 73 million profiles that identified people as “jerk” or “not a jerk” and then offered them the option to change their profiles for $30. According to the FTC, consumers who paid the fee often got nothing in return.
“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.
Among the acts advertised for a show in the Isle of Wight in 1849 by the “Unparalleled Necromancer Rhia Rhama Rhoos” were the Pudding Wonder and the Pyramid Wonder. The latter, it was noted, had been bought for five thousand guineas from “a Chinese Mandarin, who died of grief immediately after parting with the secret.” The performer and author of the ad copy was Charles Dickens.
“In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time,” wrote Aldous Huxley in 1958. He’d thought “the completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness” were all far off, but now he had come to feel “a good deal less optimistic.” It seemed his prophecies were “coming true much sooner than I thought they would.”
When the captain of a French ship landed on the west coast of Australia in 1802 and encountered the local Bunurong people, he stripped down and exposed his genitalia, hoping to dramatize his common humanity for the natives. The Bunurong exchanged curious looks before fleeing in dismay.