To cure madness in “men fond of literature,” medical encyclopedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus suggests reading aloud to them “incorrectly, if that’s what gets them going; for by correcting you they begin to divert their mind.”
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An antigerm campaign to outlaw the shared drinking cups used at public fountains spread through the United States in 1911. One pamphlet referred to the “cup of death”; another showed the Grim Reaper enticing a young girl to take a sip. Illinois declared the practice “as antiquated as the ducking stool and the inquisition,” while the American Medical Association noted a curious new “jet apparatus” that could keep a child’s lips from touching a water spout.
On June 15, 1904, a fire broke out on the General Slocum, a steamboat crossing the East River with over thirteen hundred passengers on board, and it sank. Few of the passengers could swim, most were wearing thick layers of clothes, and the life vests were faulty. An estimated 1,021 people died—the deadliest day in New York City’s history until September 11, 2001.
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.
“When the maids are beautiful and the concubines charming, this is not a blessing,” warns Confucian master Zhu Bolu in a seventeenth-century work of household advice. “For servants,” his next maxim advises, “don’t employ handsome boys.”
Taiwanese regulators fined the Chang Guann Company in 2014 for selling 645 tons of so-called gutter oil—cooking oil illegally recycled from restaurant waste and animal by-products—and distributing it to more than 1,200 restaurants, schools, and food processors. The adulterated product showed up in instant noodles, cakes, dumplings, and canned pork.
“By its policy,” wrote Vitruvius between 30 bc and 15 bc, the Roman Empire “curbs the courage of the northern barbarians; by its strength, the imaginative south. Thus the divine mind has allotted to the Roman state an excellent and temperate region in order to rule the world.”
Not long before his death in 961, Umayyad caliph Abd al-Rahman III testified that over his fifty years of reign, during which “riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call,” he had “diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness.” Al-Rahman had counted only fourteen. “O man,” he lamented, “place not thy confidence in this present world!”
In William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macduff asks the Porter, “What three things does drink especially provoke?” The Porter replies, “nose painting, sleep, and urine”—the first of which is usually taken to mean the red flush that comes across a drinker’s face. It also leads to lechery, the Porter says, adding, “it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.”
The gaseous relief offered by carbonated water when drunk after heavy kosher meals made seltzer popular among early twentieth-century Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, who accordingly gave it the nickname belchwasser.
“That 150 lawyers should do business together ought not to be expected,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1821, in his autobiography, referring to the inefficiency of Congress. Woodrow Wilson judged the House of Representatives in his doctoral thesis, published in 1885 as his first book, “a disintegrate mass of jarring elements.” Mark Twain wrote, twelve years later, “It can probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
“Considering how seldom people think of looking for sunset at all, and how seldom, if they do, they are in a position from which it can be fully seen,” it’s rare to witness an excellent one, John Ruskin argued in 1843. Evelyn Waugh saw a radiant pink sunset behind a shadow-gray Mount Etna in 1929. “Nothing I have ever seen in Art or Nature,” he wrote, “was quite so revolting.”
Of countries using the death penalty in 2012, the U.S. had the fifth-highest number of executions (43) after China (thousands), Iran (314), Iraq (129), and Saudi Arabia (79). Texas was the state with the most (15), bringing Governor Rick Perry’s total orders of execution up to 252. The figure is by far the highest of any U.S. governor and is trailed distantly by that of Perry’s predecessor, George W. Bush, who ordered 152—although Bush was in office for just shy of six years, as opposed to Perry’s twelve.
In June 2020 the city council of Sturgis, South Dakota, mailed surveys to determine whether residents favored proceeding with or postponing the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in August. Nearly 63 percent of respondents wanted the event postponed, while 37 percent voted for it to proceed. Despite the democratic results, the council went ahead with the rally, which attracted 460,000 people to the city of 7,287. The state of South Dakota confirmed 124 residents had become sick from coronavirus after attending the rally.
In 1936 Sotheby’s auctioned many of Isaac Newton’s nonscientific papers, containing much writing about his alchemical interests. A large batch was bought by John Maynard Keynes, who wrote in a lecture published posthumously as “Newton, the Man,” that the physicist and mathematician “was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.”