In the late eighteenth century, yellow fever was widespread in the Caribbean; case-fatality rates among British troops there were as high as 70 percent. The fate of French troops sent to Saint-Domingue to suppress a slave rebellion was even worse. “Evidence suggests the troops were actually an expeditionary force with intentions to invade North America through New Orleans and to establish a major holding in the Mississippi valley,” wrote the authors of a 2013 scholarly paper. Mortality from the disease thwarted Napoleon’s “secret ambition to colonize and hold French-held lands, which later became better known as the Louisiana Purchase.”
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Forty-five years ago, cosmologist Brandon Carter postulated that no observer should expect to find that he or she had come into existence exceptionally early in the history of his or her species. “Suppose you know that your name is in a lottery urn,” writes philosopher John Leslie, “but not how many other names the urn contains. You estimate, however, that there’s a half chance it contains a thousand names, and a half chance of its containing only ten. Your name then appears among the first three drawn from the urn. Don’t you have rather strong grounds for revising your estimate? Shouldn’t you now think it very improbable that there are another 997 names waiting to be drawn?”
The Communist Party of China considered “revolution in mind” a prerequisite for political emancipation in the 1940s. Work reports tell of “speaking bitterness” sessions—in which peasants would share stories of their oppression—sometimes referred to as “turn-over-mind meetings.” The meetups later served as inspiration for feminist consciousness-raising groups in the United States during the 1970s.
When told by a doctor that he was dying in 1851, J.M.W. Turner replied, “Go downstairs, take a glass of sherry, and then look at me again.” The doctor followed the painter’s suggestion but returned with the same prognosis. The day Turner died he was wheeled to the window so that he could see the sunshine on the river and boats passing by.
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.”
“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.”
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.”
“Kings embodied the whole period of their reign,” wrote Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power. “Their death, whether it came with the decline of their strength or, as later, coincided with their natural span of life, indicated a break in time. They were time. Between one king and the next, time stood still. There was a gap in it—an interregnum—which people sought to keep as short as possible.”
A 1959 Chicago Daily Tribune article about Robert Frost, who had recently proclaimed his confidence in humanity’s resilience in the face of missile threats, ran with the headline human race bomb proof, poet believes.
According to one theory, the association between storks and human infants in northern European folklore arose from an ancient Germanic custom of holding weddings on the summer solstice, before storks began their annual migration to Africa. Nine months later, when the babies conceived the previous summer were being born, the storks would return north to breed.
A twelfth-century-bc Chinese king consulted an oracle and was told his lucky charm would not be a tiger, dragon, bear, or leopard but rather a wise counselor. He soon came upon a sagacious old man fishing in the river and conscripted him into service. It is said the man’s virtue was such that he fished not with a hook but with a straight piece of iron; acknowledging his integrity, fish impaled themselves voluntarily.
Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and NSA, claimed while discussing the NSA’s collection of telephone-call metadata, “We kill people based on metadata,” quickly qualifying, “But that’s not what we do with this metadata.” When declining an interview about alleged U.S. cyberattacks on Iran, he sent a one-line email that read, “Don’t know what I would have to say beyond what I read in the papers.”
In Guerrilla Warfare, Che Guevara suggested that a well-prepared revolutionary should carry the following items: rifle, ammunition, food, plate, knife, fork, canteen, antibiotics, paper, a compass, nylon cloth, soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, a pair of pants, a book (“biographies of past heroes, histories, or economic geographies”), a machete, a small bottle of gasoline, kindling, matches, needles, thread, and buttons.
According to Diogenes Laërtius’ third-century Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers, Plato was applauded for his definition of man as a featherless biped, so Diogenes the Cynic “plucked the feathers from a cock, brought it to Plato’s school, and said, ‘Here is Plato’s man.’ ” When asked about the origin of his epithet, cynic deriving from the Greek word for dog, Diogenes replied that it was given to him because he “fawns upon those who give him anything and barks at those who give him nothing.”
Thomas Edison received three months of formal education at the age of eight before his mother homeschooled him. Benjamin Franklin quit school at age ten, Charles Dickens at twelve.