Lamoignon de Malesherbes chose to defend Louis XVI during his trial of 1792 and 1793; years earlier, as secretary of state, Malesherbes had reported on the corruption in the king’s administration and condemned the imprisonment of French citizens without trial. Both the king and the lawyer were eventually guillotined. “No one is ignorant of the fact that M. de M, after defending the people before King Louis XVI, defended King Louis XVI before the people. I have not forgotten and will never forget these two exemplary actions,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, who was Malesherbes’ great-grandson.
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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.
It is said that a visitor once came to the home of Nobel Prize–winning physicist Niels Bohr and, having noticed a horseshoe hung above the entrance, asked incredulously if the professor believed horseshoes brought good luck. “No,” Bohr replied, “but I am told that they bring luck even to those who do not believe in them.”
Thirtieth U.S. president Calvin Coolidge, nicknamed “Silent Cal,” once sat next to a woman at a dinner party who reportedly said to him, “I have made a bet, Mr. Coolidge, that I could get more than two words out of you.” To which he replied, “You lose.”
Game developer Dong Nguyen released the mobile game Flappy Bird in 2013. By the end of January 2014, it had become the most popular free app in the iOS App Store. A month later Nguyen removed the game from platforms, believing it to be too addictive. The sudden removal drove up prices for cell phones with the game preinstalled. “I think it had become a problem,” said Nguyen. “To solve that problem, it’s best to take down Flappy Bird. It’s gone forever.”
In 2014 the Federal Trade Commission charged the operator of Jerk.com with improperly obtaining personal information from Facebook to create 73 million profiles that identified people as “jerk” or “not a jerk” and then offered them the option to change their profiles for $30. According to the FTC, consumers who paid the fee often got nothing in return.
Primo Levi’s 1971 short story “Heading West” describes a group of indigenous people who refuse to partake in an experiment requiring them to take a new drug purported to end a suicide epidemic; the chief writes that his people “prefer freedom to drugs and death to illusion.” A few years later, after Levi’s German teacher was found hanged, Levi refused to sign a petition claiming that he had actually been murdered, insisting that “suicide is a right we all have.” In a letter, Levi described suicide as “an act of will, a free decision.” His own death in 1987—from a fall down his apartment building’s stairwell—was ruled a suicide, though some contemporary scholars have contested this.
The Spinhuis was founded in Amsterdam in 1597 for the purpose of detaining women arrested for adultery, fornication, prostitution, or drunkenness. In addition to being “chastised and betrayed,” inmates were put to work spinning flax and wool.
Referring to the printers’ strike that began in St. Petersburg in 1905 and helped to inaugurate the October Revolution, Leon Trotsky wrote, “They demanded a shorter working day and a higher piecework rate per thousand letters set, not excluding punctuation marks. This small event set off nothing more nor less than the all-Russian political strike—that is, a strike which started over punctuation marks and ended by felling absolutism.”
In 1387 the physicians to Charles II of Navarre, in order to treat his illness, soaked his sheets in aqua vitae, a distilled wine, and wrapped him in them to enhance the curative power that the liquid was supposed to possess. The sheets were then sewn shut by a maid, who, instead of cutting the final bit of string, set a candle to it. The alcohol-soaked king went up in a blaze and the maid ran away, leaving him to burn to death.
Asked whether it was night or day that first emerged when the universe came into existence, sixth-century-bc Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus replied, “Night, earlier by a day.”
“The ancient Roman class struggle was only fought out within a privileged minority,” wrote Karl Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed a purely passive pedestal for the combatants. People forget J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi’s significant expression: the Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat.”
The Umayyad poet Dhu al-Rumma, of the Bedouin tradition, was known to ask his listeners to transcribe his poems as he was reciting them, declaring that a book “does not forget or alter words or phrases which have taken the poet a long time to compose.”
In September 1776, fearing illness from night air, John Adams asked Benjamin Franklin to close the window of their room in a New Jersey inn. “I believe you are not acquainted with my Theory of Colds,” Franklin responded, launching into “a harangue upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration” in favor of leaving windows open. “I was so much amused,” Adams wrote in his journal, “that I soon fell asleep and left him and his philosophy together.”
In the law courts of democratic Athens in the fifth century bc, citizens on trial were compelled to offer their own defenses, often hiring speechwriters. “If I make a mistake in speaking, pardon me and treat it as due to inexperience rather than dishonesty,” pleaded one defendant, who had hired the orator Antiphon to compose the entire speech.