About cilantro in a dish, Julia Child said, “I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor.”
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In 1840 Mikhail Lermontov published his only novel, A Hero of Our Time, in which the protagonist, Pechorin, kills a fellow officer in a duel in the Caucasus. A year later, Lermontov wrote in a poem, “In noon’s heat, in a dale of Dagestan / With lead inside my breast, stirless I lay; / The deep wound still smoked on.” Within a few months, Lermontov was dead, killed in a duel with a fellow officer in the Caucasus, shot through the heart after firing his own gun into the air.
“How annoyed I am with society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal,” novelist E.M. Forster wrote in 1963, when he was nearly eighty-five years old. “The subterfuges, the self-consciousness that might have been avoided.”
Residents of North Yorkshire from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries were so afraid of the dead rising to attack the living that they would dismember, decapitate, burn, and otherwise mutilate corpses before burying them. The process was generally undertaken shortly after death, when the bones were still soft.
Among those who stayed at the Florida Hotel while reporting on the Spanish Civil War were John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Herbst, Robert Capa, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Martha Gellhorn. Gellhorn noted a day when an “influx of shits” came for lunch, one of whom was “a nice handsome dumb named Errol Flynn who looks like white fire on screen but is only very, very average off.”
Dorothy Parker was once asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence. “You can lead a horticulture,” she replied, “but you can’t make her think.”
A third-century collection of Roman jurisprudence includes sentences for adulterers: a woman is to be exiled to an island; a man, “punished by a similar exile to an island.” Later scholars clarified: the man’s exile is “presumably to a different island from that of the woman.”
“You don’t need a brain to sleep” was a central takeaway for a team of biologists who found that Cassiopea, a genus of upside-down jellyfish, display signs of sleep deprivation when disturbed by water pulses at twenty-minute intervals throughout the night.
“Why was it the custom for those canvassing for office to do so wearing the toga without the tunic underneath?” the second-century writer Plutarch asks in his Roman Questions, referring to the custom in the Roman republic of candidates campaigning in a state of relative undress. “Was it in order that they might not carry money in the folds of their tunic and give bribes?…Or were they trying to commend themselves to popular favor by thus humiliating themselves by their scanty attire, even as they do by hand shaking, personal appeals, and fawning behavior?”
Having come to the U.S. through Portugal, French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote and illustrated part of The Little Prince—one of the best-selling works of fiction of all time—in a twenty-two room mansion on Long Island in 1942. “I wanted a hut,” he reflected, “and it’s the Palace of Versailles.”
Titus Andronicus is William Shakespeare’s bloodiest play; the body count reaches fourteen. Rounding out the top-three deadliest plays are Richard III (eleven) and King Lear (ten).
In 2014 Amelia Hamrick, an undergraduate at Oklahoma Christian University, noticed musical notes written across the buttocks of one of the denizens of hell depicted in Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. She transcribed it into modern notation and made a recording she posted on her blog. “So yes,” she wrote, “this is literally the 600-year-old butt song from hell.” The post went viral.
In November 1934 a team of American baseball stars, including Babe Ruth, toured Japan. When they arrived for a game in the town of Narashino, each man was presented with a horseshoe-shaped flower wreath. Ruth detested the gift; he later told a Japanese baseball magazine that he considered such wreaths bad luck and had never hit a home run after receiving one.
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.
In August 2018 data scientist David Bamman examined how authors recently interviewed in the New York Times’ By the Book column answered the question “What’s on your nightstand?” Women mentioned male and female authors almost equally; men mentioned male authors more than 79 percent of the time. “Don’t read in bed,” advised Fran Lebowitz. “It’s too stimulating. Watch TV instead. It’s boring.”