President Warren Harding embarked on a journey to Alaska in June 1923, taking with him his secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover. “If you knew of a great scandal in our administration,” he asked Hoover, “would you, for the good of the country and the party, expose it publicly or would you bury it?” Hoover urged the president to reveal what would become known as the Teapot Dome scandal, but Harding feared the political fallout. He died of a heart attack in San Francisco two months later.
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A king in twelfth-century-bc China enjoyed women wearing dangling pearls and jade in a “Hair-knot Which Sways at Every Step”; the emperor who built the Great Wall favored the “Hair-knot Which Rises Above the Clouds”; Tang women wore the “Hair-knot of the Homing Bird”; and a writer in the last years of the Manchu dynasty offered the name “Hair-knot of Disintegration and Homeless Wandering” for a style of the day. “The times are indeed out of joint!” he wrote. “I tremble to think of what is to come.”
“Memory,” wrote the novelist Jean Paul in 1816, “is the only paradise out of which we cannot be driven away.” Critical theorist Theodor Adorno disagreed with his assertion. “Memories cannot be conserved in drawers and pigeonholes,” he wrote in response. “Precisely where they become controllable and objectified, where the subject believes himself entirely sure of them, memories fade like delicate wallpapers in bright sunlight.”
“Mine is a peaceable disposition,” Heinrich Heine writes in his journals, declaring simple wishes: a humble cottage, some fine trees out front. But “if God wants to make my happiness complete,” he adds, “he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before their death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies—but not before they have been hanged.”
In a behavior known as “transient sexual mimicry,” male giant cuttlefish can assume the behavior and coloring of female cuttlefish in order to bypass larger males and impregnate their desired mates.
“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 2016, after saxophonist Dan Fabbio was diagnosed with a brain tumor, neuroscientists in Rochester, New York, used functional MRI scans to create a brain map indicating areas crucial for music processing. Fabbio was awake during the surgery and, once the tumor was removed, played a Korean folk song to ensure his skill on saxophone remained; the song’s short notes allowed him to take shallow breaths so his brain would not protrude from his opened skull.
Poet Edward Fairfax kept a 1621 account of his daughter Helen’s terrible nightmares, describing an incident in which she complained about a demonic white cat that “has been long upon me and drawn my breath.” The cat, she said, “has left in my mouth and throat so filthy a smell that it does poison me.”
For brawling with a papal scribe in 1462, poet François Villon was imprisoned and sentenced to be “strangled and hanged.” While awaiting his death, he wrote this quatrain: “Francis I am, which weighs me down, / born in Paris near Pontoise town, / and with a stretch of rope my pate / will learn for once my arse’s weight.” On January 5, 1463, the sentence was commuted to banishment from Paris. Nothing further is known of his life.
Humpback whales, which have a sonic range of at least seven octaves, create songs between the length of a modern ballad and a symphony movement, possibly because their attention span is similar to that of humans. Their tunes also contain repeated refrains that form melodic rhymes, suggesting that, like humans, they use these as mnemonic devices.
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.
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins is hired by dwarfs to steal a dragon’s treasure. The agreement in the 1937 novel is only two sentences, but the 2012 movie adaptation substantially expanded the contract; souvenir reproductions of the film prop measure five feet in length. One law blogger deemed it to be “pretty well written” despite noticing a certain inconsistency regarding whether Baggins is the dwarfs’ employee or an independent contractor.
To combat widespread tardiness in the Ivory Coast, President Laurent Gbagbo in 2007 backed a Punctuality Night contest, which touted the slogan “African time is killing Africa, let’s fight it.” Nine prizes were awarded to the most punctual civil servants and businesspeople. Known to his colleagues as “Mr. White Man’s Time,” legal adviser Narcisse Aka won the first-place prize, a $60,000 villa.
In June 2020 the city council of Sturgis, South Dakota, mailed surveys to determine whether residents favored proceeding with or postponing the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in August. Nearly 63 percent of respondents wanted the event postponed, while 37 percent voted for it to proceed. Despite the democratic results, the council went ahead with the rally, which attracted 460,000 people to the city of 7,287. The state of South Dakota confirmed 124 residents had become sick from coronavirus after attending the rally.
Although many New York City theaters closed during the influenza pandemic of 1918, Broadway’s Plymouth Theater went ahead with its October 3 premiere of Leo Tolstoy’s Redemption. Frustrated by the audience’s coughing at one performance, lead actor John Barrymore returned to the stage after intermission and threw a “fair-sized sea bass” into the crowd, shouting, “Busy yourselves with this, you damned walruses!”