On November 24, 1793—or what then became known as Frimaire 4, II—the revolutionary French government officially replaced the Gregorian calendar, introducing one based on the Egyptian calendar with newly named months (such as Thermidor and Brumaire) of thirty days each, comprised of three ten-day weeks (each day lasted ten hours, or one thousand minutes, or ten thousand seconds). It was abolished by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806.
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According to Dignitas, an end-of-life clinic located in Switzerland, 70 percent of people who begin the formal process of assisted suicide do not go through with it.
A CIA report declassified in 2000 revealed concerns about extrasensory perception during the space race in the 1960s: a Russian newspaper argued that cosmonauts “get together mentally with each other easier than with people on Earth,” while a Chicago Tribune columnist worried that the Soviets “may be the first to put a human thought in orbit or achieve mind-to-mind communication with men on the moon.”
It is said that Anton Chekhov’s last words were, “It’s been a long time since I’ve had champagne.” He died in Badenweiler, Germany, in 1904, and his body was transported back to Moscow in a refrigerated railcar marked fresh oysters.
A 2013 study involving American college students found that participants were more likely to deem a face more attractive if it was presented amid a group of faces than if it was displayed alone. This “cheerleader effect,” scientists ventured, was “due to the averaging out of unattractive idiosyncrasies.” Two years later a similar study conducted with Japanese participants failed to replicate the results of the initial study.
While on his American lecture tour in 1882, Oscar Wilde drank elderberry wine with Walt Whitman; saw Niagara Falls, later noting, “Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life”; read aloud passages from Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography to miners in Colorado; and witnessed a lynching in Louisiana.
“Your minds are full of all kinds of treacherous plans,” wrote Indian activist Tarabai Shinde, addressing men in an 1882 pamphlet. One plan: “Let’s bluff this moneylender and pocket a thousand rupees from him.” Another: “That woman Y, what a coquette she really is! What airs she gives herself! Must corner her one of these days and see whether some affair with her can be managed.” Such “insidious perfidies,” she concluded, “never enter a woman’s mind.”
Ahead of a visit from Hannah Arendt in 1971, Mary McCarthy purchased anchovy paste, which she knew Arendt enjoyed. When McCarthy pointed out where to find it in her cupboard, Arendt looked displeased. “She had a respect for privacy, separateness,” McCarthy later wrote. “I knew I had done something wrong in my efforts to please. She did not wish to be known, in that curiously finite and, as it were, reductive way. And I had done it to show her I knew her—a sign of love, though not always—thereby proving that in the last analysis I did not know her at all.”
A letter dated to the eighteenth century BC sent by a servant to Zimri-Lim, the king of Mari, details a system of long-distance signal fires, thought to be the first ever in use.
A section on law and justice in the Arthashastra, an ancient Indian manual of statecraft, describes an apparently coveted capital punishment. “Being gored to death by an elephant is as meritorious as having the sacred bath at the end of the ashvamedha horse sacrifice,” it reads. Anyone seeking this sentence is required to provide gifts of rice, wine, and garlands as well as “a piece of cloth to clean the tusks.”
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.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who gave thirty so-called fireside chats over twelve years, was afraid of fire and refused to lock his door while sleeping so as to ensure easy escape, which he would often practice by dropping quickly from his bed or chair and crawling to the exit.
“The worst punishment God can devise for this sinner,” wrote Harper Lee—who loved casino gambling—in a 1990 letter, “is to make her spirit reside eternally at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City.”
In a June 2019 article published in Nature Climate Change, researchers concluded that the “northernmost spatial regime boundary” for birds in the Great Plains of North America has shifted to the north by more than 350 miles over the past forty-six years, an indication of rapid global change. “Climate change, anthropogenic pressures, wildfire trends, and woody plant invasions,” according to the researchers, “have all operated along a putatively south-to-north trajectory over the past decades.”
Researchers working with the Tsimané of the Amazon found that tribe members could tell the difference between consonance and dissonance but took them to be equally pleasant, giving credence to the idea that Western preference for consonance is not biological. “The Greeks were really into ratios,” speculated the lead researcher. “It’s possible they started making music that way and we’ve been stuck with it ever since.”