Hoping to encourage hostages held by FARC during Colombia’s civil war, state negotiators commissioned a local producer in 2010 to create a pop song embedded with a Morse-code message and had it broadcast repeatedly on the radio in rebel-controlled areas. After the lyrics “Listen to this message, brother,” the code sounded as a synth interlude: “Nineteen people rescued. You are next. Don’t lose hope.”
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Scholars in the 1970s compiling the first comprehensive Sumerian dictionary struggled to interpret a phrase that translated into English as “He put a hot fish in her navel.”
Banished from the kingdom of Kindah, the sixth-century prince and poet Imru al-Qays spent much of his life wandering the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula developing the literary genre wuquf ala al-atlal, or “stopping by the ruins.” “The courtyards and enclosures of the old home have become desolate,” he wrote in one verse, “the dung of the wild deer lies there thick as the seeds of pepper.”
“Six days, six weeks. I doubt six months,” said Donald Rumsfeld, on February 7, 2003, about the duration of the Iraq war. “Whatever happens in Vietnam, I can conceive of nothing except military victory,” Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1967. Four years before that, Robert McNamara asserted, “The war in Vietnam is going well and will succeed.”
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.
In 480 bc, with the Persian army on the cusp of defeating Greece, Athenian general Themistocles sent a trusted slave to convey a message to Persian king Xerxes; the note professed allegiance to Persia and reported many Greek ships prepared to defect. The Persians, acting hastily on this false intelligence, sailed into the Strait of Salamis, where the Greek fleet was waiting and gained a decisive victory.
Union general William T. Sherman believed newspaper correspondents to be liabilities. “A spy is one who furnishes an enemy with knowledge useful to him and dangerous to us,” Sherman wrote in an 1863 letter. “I say—in giving intelligence to the enemy, in sowing discord and discontent in an army—these men fulfill all the conditions of spies.”
About how statements get written up by the press, Andy Warhol wrote, “It would always be different from what I’d actually said—and a lot more fun for me to read. Like if I’d said, ‘In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,’ it could come out ‘In fifteen minutes everyone will be famous.’ ” About the future, Andy Warhol also wrote, “I really do live for the future, because when I’m eating a box of candy, I can’t wait to taste the last piece. I don’t even taste any of the other pieces.”
In 1936, as part of the Federal Theater Project, Orson Welles at the age of twenty staged a version of Macbeth with an all-black cast, substituting voodoo for witchcraft and changing the setting from Scotland to Haiti. Reflecting on his interest in film in an interview in 1958, Welles said, “I liked cinema before I began to do it. Now I can’t stop myself from hearing the clappers at the beginning of each shot; the magic is destroyed.”
In 1993 Estelle Ellis, Seventeen magazine’s first promotion director, gave a speech at the Fashion Institute of Technology titled “What Is Fashion?” Ellis gave her answer. Fashion is a perpetual-motion machine expressed in four areas: “mode—the way we dress; manners—the way we express ourselves; mores—the way we live; and markets—the way we are defined demographically and psychologically.”
Before the nineteenth century, a conductor’s baton was a baseball-bat-size implement that was banged against the floor to keep time. This could be dangerous. In 1687, while conducting a symphony playing Te Deum for Louis XIV, who had just recovered from serious illness, composer Jean-Baptiste Lully accidentally struck his foot with his baton, causing inflammation in his toe. He refused amputation, and an infection spread, killing him two months later.
In the days after a July 1917 German air raid on London that killed forty civilians, Harry Gordon Selfridge, the American-born owner of Selfridges department store, took out ads declaring he would award $5,000 of life insurance on behalf of anyone killed by such an attack while shopping at his store. His building, he noted, was made out of concrete.
A seventh-century Chinese treatise declares after “careful investigation” that “there are but thirty main positions for consummating the sexual union.” These include Bamboos Near the Altar, Reversed Flying Ducks, Phoenix Holding Its Chicken, Cat and Mouse in One Hole, and Donkeys in the Third Moon of Spring. “The understanding reader,” it concludes, will “probe their wonderful meaning to its very depth.”
According to the iron hypothesis, sprinkling iron into low-chlorophyll regions of the ocean would create large algal blooms. Oceanographer John Martin argued that large-scale iron enrichment could grow enough algae in the oceans to absorb carbon from the atmosphere and reverse the greenhouse effect. “Give me half a tanker of iron,” he famously said in 1988, “and I will give you an ice age.”
Herodotus wrote that whenever an important decision was to be made by Persian men, they discussed the matter when drunk. The next day, the consensus they reached was reexamined when sober. If it was still amenable, the motion passed; if it wasn’t, it was scrapped. “Conversely,” Herodotus continued, “any decision they make when they are sober is reconsidered afterward when they are drunk.”