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.
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Winston Churchill claimed the soft texture of woven silk underwear was vital to his well-being; “I have a very delicate and sensitive cuticle which demands the finest covering,” he said. His wife, Clementine, told a friend that his pink underclothes “cost the eyes out of the head.”
“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.”
A group of scientists in Madrid in 2012 found that children inherit a fear of the dentist more from fathers than from mothers.
In 2005 the British Cheese Board attempted to dispel the idea that eating cheese before bed causes nightmares. No evidence of this “evil myth” was reported among two hundred volunteers, though eating Stilton was found to lead to “crazy” dreams, while eating cheddar often led to dreams of celebrities. “We hope that people will think positively about eating cheese before bed,” said the board secretary.
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.
Friendship cannot exist “between the well-fed, prosperous / and the lean and down-and-out in the world,” states the Panchatantra, a collection of Indian animal fables from around the third century bc. In one story, when a crow tries to befriend a mole after witnessing his impressive skill in escaping from hunters’ traps, the mole exclaims, “You are the eater; I am the food. What kind of friendship can exist between us?”
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.
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.”
As a child in Mexico in the 1650s, the nun and writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz “abstained from eating cheese because I had heard that it made one slow of wits, for in me the desire for learning was stronger than the desire for eating—as powerful as that is in children.”
In 480 bc, with the Persian army on the cusp of defeating Greece, Athenian general Themistocles sent a trusted slave to convey a message to Persian king Xerxes; the note professed allegiance to Persia and reported many Greek ships prepared to defect. The Persians, acting hastily on this false intelligence, sailed into the Strait of Salamis, where the Greek fleet was waiting and gained a decisive victory.
“Today is my eighteenth birthday!” Alexandrina Victoria wrote in her journal on May 24, 1837. Less than a month later, she was awoken at six o’clock and informed she was queen of the United Kingdom. “I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced,” she noted that day, “but I am sure that very few have more real goodwill and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.” Her reign, at 63 years and 216 days, is the second longest of the British monarchy.
In 1873, as part of the Bone Wars, paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh complained in The American Naturalist that his rival, Edward Drinker Cope, was dentally inept; he “mistook canines for incisors, nasals for frontals, maxillaries for premaxillaries, maxillaries for nasals, and maxillaries for frontals!” Cope claimed he was “too fully occupied on more important subjects.”
A common belief in antiquity was that bees were born of decaying ox flesh. Virgil instructs in his Georgics to stop up a young bullock’s nostrils and mouth, beat it “to a pulp through the unbroken hide,” shut the carcass in a small room to ferment, and await the bees that will burst out “like a shower pouring from summer clouds.”
According to the iron hypothesis, sprinkling iron into low-chlorophyll regions of the ocean would create large algal blooms. Oceanographer John Martin argued that large-scale iron enrichment could grow enough algae in the oceans to absorb carbon from the atmosphere and reverse the greenhouse effect. “Give me half a tanker of iron,” he famously said in 1988, “and I will give you an ice age.”