Philocles, the nephew of Aeschylus, received the prize for tragedy at the dramatic festival the year that Sophocles presented Oedipus Rex. None of his one hundred or so plays is extant.
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On July 23, 1995, in New Mexico, the astronomer Alan Hale saw an unidentified fuzzy object in the sky. He emailed the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams. In Arizona, Tom Bopp saw the same thing. He telegrammed the bureau. The comet was named Hale-Bopp the following day. Believing that a UFO was traveling behind it, thirty-eight members of The Heaven’s Gate cult committed suicide on March 26, 1997, six days before the comet reached its perihelion.
“By its policy,” wrote Vitruvius between 30 bc and 15 bc, the Roman Empire “curbs the courage of the northern barbarians; by its strength, the imaginative south. Thus the divine mind has allotted to the Roman state an excellent and temperate region in order to rule the world.”
In his eponymous saga, Icelandic outlaw Grettir swims through icy waters to a friend’s farm. That night, while he sleeps on a bench inside the longhouse, his clothes fall off. He wakes the next morning to a servant woman laughing at him. “He’s out of proportion,” she says. “He’s big but small between the legs.” This episode, according to a scholar of saga-era Icelandic life, “illustrates the openness of the life in the hall.”
In 1927 Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik identified a phenomenon that came to be known as the Zeigarnik effect, which states that waiters are good at remembering particulars of a restaurant bill—until the bill is paid. “Unfinished tasks are remembered approximately twice as well as completed ones,” concluded Zeigarnik.
The Ongee of the Andaman Islands base their calendar on smell: their names for seasons derive from the flowers that are in bloom at the time.
“In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes,” wrote Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul: Memories and the City. “When we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. It is a useful distinction to make as we ‘remember’ our earliest life experiences, our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, all as reported by our parents, stories to which we listen with the same rapt attention we might pay some brilliant tale of some other person.”
Paul Biya has been president of Cameroon for forty-four years—the second-longest tenure for a nonroyal elected leader. Biya won his seventh term in 2018, with 71 percent of the vote. Since taking power in November 1982, he has placed his country 148th in the world in terms of economic output per capita and 163rd in the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings. The longest-serving leader is Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, president of Equatorial Guinea since 1979.
A nineteen-year-old boy diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma requested help from the Make-A-Wish Foundation in 1998 to hunt a moose with his father. His request was denied. A year later the foundation instituted a national ban on firearm-related wishes, and the boy’s mother founded Hunt of a Lifetime, an organization devoted to sending terminally ill children deep-sea fishing or on hunting trips for sheep, elk, moose, or bear.
To clear his head during his martial-arts training in the 1950s, Bruce Lee went sailing. He slapped the water angrily and found it instructive about kung fu. “I struck it but it did not suffer hurt,” he later wrote. “I then tried to grasp a handful of it but this proved impossible.” Lee was energized. “That was it!” he recalled. “I wanted to be like the nature of water.”
In her account of tenth-century Kyoto court life, The Pillow Book, Sei Shōnagon was fond of making lists. “Things later regretted: an adopted child who turns out to have an ugly face”; “Things it’s frustrating and embarrassing to witness: someone insists on telling you about some horrid little child, carried away with her own infatuation with the creature, imitating its voice as she gushes about the cute and winning things it says”; “Moving things: a child dressed in mourning for a parent.”
“People think this pandemic is an accident,” wrote Nassim Nicholas Taleb in May 2020 of the Covid-19 crisis. “It is not. It is part of the system we have built. When you read the history of England, Italy, and the Middle East, you read of frequent quarantines and lockdowns because of sieges and plagues. These were built into the economic landscape and into the costs of every merchant. So the cost of the pandemic and future pandemics should be set against gross domestic product figures. We must realize our real economic growth is much lower than our annual figures suggest because the disasters wipe out the growth of preceding years.”
The critic Vladimir Stassov recalled that when the composers Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Modest Mussorgsky “were still young men living together in one room…The piano could be heard, and the singing would start, and with great excitement and bustle they would show me what they had composed the previous day, or the day before or the day before that—how wonderful it was."
When the British Petroleum oil rig Deepwater Horizon was forced to shut down temporarily because of a gas surge, one engineer tried to persuade his colleagues that a liner was required to secure the pipe. The proposal, which would have cost about $7 million, was rejected by management. “This has been a nightmare well which has everyone all over the place,” the engineer wrote to a colleague. Six days later, on April 20, 2010, the rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico and spilled more than four million barrels of oil before it was capped almost three months later.
Russian legend holds that the first dog was created without fur. He soon lost patience waiting for it and so ran after a passing stranger, who turned out to be the devil. Owing to this evil allegiance, the fur originally intended for him went instead to the first cat, from which derives the antipathy between their descendants: dogs believe cats have stolen their property.