“There is one thing at which I cannot sufficiently wonder,” wrote Pliny the Elder, “that of some trees, the very memory has perished, and even the names recorded by authors have passed out of knowledge.”
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After watching a performance of his play Peter Pan with his five-year-old godson, J. M. Barrie asked the boy what he had liked best. “What I think I liked best,” the boy replied, “was tearing up the program and dropping the bits on people’s heads.”
Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens, Henry Fielding Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton Dickens, Walter Landor Dickens, and Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens were among the names of Charles Dickens’ sons. Among the brothers of Walter Whitman were George Washington Whitman, Andrew Jackson Whitman, and Thomas Jefferson Whitman.
The third-century Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtius stated that one of the favorite sayings of Antisthenes was, “The fellowship of brothers of one mind was stronger than any fortified city.” Laërtius also recalled an anecdote about Socrates—when asked by a young man if he should marry or not, the philosopher replied, “Whichever you do, you will regret it.”
A hen near Leeds, England, caused a panic in 1806 when she began laying eggs inscribed with the words Christ is Coming. Terror of Judgment Day swept the population until it was observed that the hen’s owner, Mary Bateman, who had been charging a penny per visitor, was writing the message on eggs and forcibly reinserting them into the hen to be laid again.
Euripidean drama requires “the sudden jolt of the machine” to clarify the characters’ “peculiar sense of the political,” writes classicist John Snyder. “The deus ex machina breaks in because that is what history does…outside forces, irrational, nonhuman in origin and agency, yet utterly human at the same time, make people do what they do.”
Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan reported on a pink blazer and black V-neck shirt worn on the Senate floor in 2007. “There was cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN2,” Givhan wrote. “It belonged to Senator Hillary Clinton.”
In a 1985 election for the Victorian Legislative Council in Australia, candidates Bob Ives and Rosemary Varty tied at 54,281 votes each. Ives won the seat with a casting vote provided by an official who drew Ives’ name from a hat. The Court of Disputed Returns voided the result after determining that forty-four votes had not been counted. Varty won a subsequent special election.
A Hindu myth holds that the universe began as soul in the form of man, who looked around, saw nothing, and felt afraid. “Therefore,” goes the story, “one who is all alone is afraid.” The man reflected, “Since there is nothing other than me, of what am I afraid?” His fear vanished, since a being only “becomes afraid of a second.” But he felt no joy, so he created a female companion: a second being, whom he could fear.
After his first wife’s suicide, Percy Bysshe Shelley applied for custody of their children. Lord Eldon denied his petition, citing the poet’s conduct and principles, which, wrote the lord, “the law calls upon me to consider as immoral and vicious” as well as “inconsistent with the duties of persons in such relations of life.”
Research conducted using the Migrant Acceptance Index, a metric developed by Gallup to assess the emotional impact of immigration on both migrants and native-born populations, found that newcomers to countries with the lowest migrant-acceptance scores rated their lives more positively than did native-born residents, but this positivity faded the longer migrants stayed. In countries with high acceptance scores, longtime migrants expressed more optimism about the future than either native-born residents or newly arrived migrants.
Shortly after her ex-husband Louis Calhern married Julia Hoyt, the novelist and actress Ilka Chase found a set of visiting cards with the name “Mrs. Louis Calhern” on them. “They were the best cards—thin, flexible parchment, highly embossed,” Chase recalled, “and it seemed a pity to waste them, and so I mailed the box to my successor. But aware of Lou’s mercurial marital habits, I wrote on the top one, ‘Dear Julia, I hope these reach you in time.’ I received no acknowledgment.”
Hatches of Rocky Mountain locusts (Melanoplus spretus) in 1874 and 1875 brought swarms up to 1,800 miles long and 110 miles wide across the Great Plains. Numbers were estimated in the trillions. Farmers risked starvation. The swarm is believed to have been the largest mass of living insects ever witnessed by modern man—but within thirty years the species disappeared. “I can’t believe M. spretus is extinct,” said ecologist Dan Otte in 2014. “But where to look for it?”
The mayor of Binalonan, a city in the Philippines, passed a law in 2019 banning gossip (chismis). Rumormongers face a two-hundred-peso fine and three hours of litter duty for a first-time offense. The mayor also banned karaoke after ten pm.
One of the oldest extant terrestrial globes, dating from around 1510, the Lenox, is the only map known to use the phrase “here be dragons,” designating an area in Southeast Asia near to the island of Komodo, known for its large lizards.