After thousands of dockworkers went on strike in the Los Angeles area in 1923 and the Industrial Workers of the World called on workers in other industries to strike in solidarity, the police announced a ban on public meetings. Upton Sinclair organized a rally in response, saying, “We’re testing the right of the police to suppress free speech and assemblage.” As soon as he took the platform, a police captain threatened, “I’m taking you in if you utter a word.” Sinclair began reciting the First Amendment and, according to a longshoreman who was present, the captain promptly “grabbed the people’s novelist by the collar” and arrested him.
Archive
Miscellany
Researchers at the MIT Media Lab recently determined that all cultural products “follow a universal decay function.” People and things are kept alive through “oral communication” for about five to thirty years. “Biographies remain in our communicative memory the longest (twenty to thirty years),” according to their report, “and music the shortest (5.6 years).”
A group of scientists in Madrid in 2012 found that children inherit a fear of the dentist more from fathers than from mothers.
In July 1990, one year before the collapse of the USSR, scholar Nicholas Eberstadt testified before a Senate committee about a CIA study of the Soviet economy, which showed high Soviet meat production and per-capita milk output—exceeding U.S. levels—though shortages were widely reported by tourists and Soviet citizens. “The Soviet government routinely hides many of its efforts from outside views,” Eberstadt granted. “But where, one wonders, are the hidden stockpiles and reserves of Soviet meat?”
From History of Dearborn, Ohio, and Switzerland Counties, Indiana (1885): “It has been repeated time and again that the annexation of Texas was carried in the U.S. Senate by one vote; that Edward A. Hannegan, then the U.S. senator from Indiana, was elected to the Senate by one vote, and that that one vote was given Hannegan by Daniel Kelso, then senator from Switzerland County, who was elected by one majority. This is an error, for Kelso, when he voted for Hannegan, represented Switzerland County by virtue of a majority of about 150 voters of the county, over Samuel Howard, at the August election of 1842. In 1843 David Henry was elected over Kelso by one majority. Kelso contested the election, and the Senate declared that neither was elected and sent them back to the people for decision, and at the August election, 1844, Henry was elected by a small but decided majority.”
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.
Seventh-century Persian king Khosrow II is said to have tested the loyalty of courtiers whom he believed were becoming too close. Telling one of his decision to execute the other, he would swear the man to secrecy and then watch the friend’s behavior. If it went unchanged, he knew the first man was loyal and had kept silent; if different, he was a traitor and dealt with accordingly.
About 40 percent of employers peer at the social-media profiles of prospective candidates, and 40 percent of party guests admit to snooping through a host’s medicine cabinet or drawers. The percent of women who admit to having looked through a partner’s phone without permission is 34 percent; of men, 62.
While walking around New York City, a young Meyer Lansky was stopped by a group of Italian teenagers demanding protection money. Their leader, later known to the public as Lucky Luciano, had been recruited into the Lower East Side’s Five Points Gang at a young age and would go on to develop a national crime syndicate. “Go fuck yourself,” Lansky responded. A lifelong friendship between the two gangsters grew out of this encounter. “They would just look at each other,” recalled Bugsy Siegel. “A few minutes later, one would say what the other was thinking.”
“A horrid-looking wretch he is, sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper, and the night man,” declared a Stephen Douglas–leaning newspaper of Abraham Lincoln during the presidential race of 1860.
The earliest reliable account of human flight concerns a Benedictine monk named Eilmer, who in 1066 fastened wings to his hands and feet, jumped from a tower, and glided more than six hundred feet before falling from the sky and breaking both his legs. He blamed the failure on not having fitted himself with a tail.
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.”
In one of the earliest references to the tragedy of the commons—a concept that describes how people use natural resources to their advantage without considering the cost to society—the economist William Forster Lloyd asked in 1833, “Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so bare-worn and cropped so differently from adjoining enclosures?”
In 1639 Puritan settlers in Massachusetts authorized the expulsion of “pauper aliens” in what is thought to be the first case of deportation in the country. Soon after, Virginia and Pennsylvania passed laws heavily restricting “the importation of paupers,” which included criminals and “foreigners and Irish servants.”
In 1610, in the harbor of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Richard Whitbourne saw a “strange creature” that was “beautiful” and had “blue streaks resembling hair” and a “hinder part” that pointed “like a broad-hooked arrow.” When it attempted to climb into his boat, one of his men “struck it full blow on the head, whereby it fell off from them.” He supposed that it was a mermaid. Two years earlier, while aboard a ship near Norway, Henry Hudson reported that “one of our company, looking overboard, saw a mermaid,” as her “back and breasts were like a woman’s,” “her skin very white,” and her tail “like the tail of a porpoise, and speckled like mackerel.”