Maurice Sendak, author of classic picture book Where the Wild Things Are, claimed in a 2011 interview never to lie to children. “I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence,” he said. He was also in search of a “yummy death,” which he believed could be done “if you’re William Blake and totally crazy.” Two months later, less than a year before he died, Sendak returned to the topic. “I’m a happy old man,” he said. “But I will cry my way all the way to the grave.”
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The West’s first flushable indoor toilet was designed in 1596 by John Harington, the “saucy godson” of Queen Elizabeth. He published his findings as The Metamorphosis of Ajax, the title a pun on a jakes, slang for a lavatory. Harington was banished from court for the pamphlet but allowed back in 1598, when he installed a water closet in the queen’s Richmond palace.
“To cross a great river,” advises a third-century Chinese alchemical text, you should smear a mixture of mercury, carp gall, and dragon grease on the bottoms of your feet. “When you walk on the water, you will not sink.”
Before leaving his post as Qi chancellor in 193 bc, Cao Can gave advice to his successor: “If you stir up the markets and empty out the jails, then evil men will have no place to stay and will make trouble for you elsewhere.” A footnote in the English text from translator Burton Watson explains: “It was an assumption among Han officials and intellectuals that most, if not all, men engaged in trade were swindlers.”
Isolated from opium by the German chemist F. W. A. Sertürner around 1804, morphine (named after Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep and dreams) was used to treat opium addicts. Invented by Bayer Pharmaceuticals in 1898, heroin (derived from the Greek word for hero) was used to treat morphine addicts.
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.
In an experimental paper published in the International Journal of Nanotechnology in 2016, researchers reported discovering a phase of water that is not solid ice, liquid water, or vapor gas. The fourth state is found at around 50 degrees Celsius and behaves a bit like liquid crystal.
In May 2020 a preliminary staff report of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York looked at several historical data sets from Germany and concluded that influenza mortality in 1918–20 caused significant societal change in the subsequent decade. Influenza deaths were associated with lower per-capita spending, especially on services consumed by the young, and were correlated with the share of votes for extremist parties in the elections of 1932 and 1933.
Charlotte Brontë wrote to a friend about a woman who “must be a regular bore with her unfortunate homophobia,” advising, “Don’t look for that word in the dictionary.” This may indicate, notes a scholar, “fear or dislike of men,” from the Latin homo (man), not the Greek homo (same). The word is unclear in the manuscript; it could also be monophobia, fear of being alone.
William Petty’s device for “double writing” made it possible, he claimed, that “any man, even at the first sight and handling, may write two resembling copies of the same thing at once.” Petty wrote one of the first-known English claims for patent rights, in his 1648 “Brief Declaration Concerning Double Writing.” “Should I have given it away for nothing?” he asked. “The thing...would have been condemned as of no use, because of no price.”
Lorenzo de’ Medici once observed a young sculptor complete the head of an old and wrinkled faun whose mouth he had rendered open. While astonished at the craftsmanship, Lorenzo pointed out that old men never have all their teeth. Once the great patron of the arts had left, the artist knocked out one of the teeth; when Lorenzo returned and saw the statue again, he was so taken with the new version that he decided to adopt the artist, whose name was Michelangelo.
Vomitorium, noun: A large passageway in an ancient amphitheater out of which crowds emptied. In Antic Hay, published in 1924, Aldous Huxley became the first recorded author in English to state erroneously that it was a domestic room in which overfed Romans vomited after feasts.
“Aristotle thought earthquakes were caused by winds trapped in subterranean caves,” wrote Anne Carson in her 2019 play Norma Jeane Baker of Troy. “We’re more scientific now, we know it’s just five guys fracking the fuck out of the world while it’s still legal.”
In the so-called Screw Plot—a supposed conspiracy to assassinate Queen Anne during a Thanksgiving service in 1710—iron bolts were removed from the roof timbers of St. Paul’s Cathedral in order for the roof to collapse during the service. “The new cathedral was not then quite finished,” wrote John Noorthouck in 1773, “and it appeared upon inquiry that the missing of these iron pins was owing to the neglect of the workmen, who supposed the timbers were sufficiently fastened without them.”
President Abraham Lincoln on November 21, 1864, sent a letter to Mrs. Bixby, who, the War Department informed him, had lost five sons fighting for the Union. “I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.” In fact, two of Mrs. Bixby’s sons were killed in action, a third either deserted or died while a prisoner of war, a fourth was honorably discharged, and the fifth deserted.