In 1956 a shelter run by Catholic social worker Dorothy Day was ordered closed by New York City for being a firetrap. Day was fined $250. On her way to court, she passed a group of needy-looking men, one of whom gave her a check and said, “I want to help out a little bit toward the fine. Here’s two-fifty.” Based on the man’s shabby dress, Day assumed he had given $2.50; later she noticed the check was for the full amount and signed by W.H. Auden, who had read about her case and come to help. “Poets do look a bit unpressed, don’t they?” Day said.
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Slaves in ancient China during the Zhou dynasty were sometimes buried alive with their recently departed masters in order that they might continue to serve them in the afterlife.
A letter dated to the eighteenth century BC sent by a servant to Zimri-Lim, the king of Mari, details a system of long-distance signal fires, thought to be the first ever in use.
After serving a three-month prison sentence in 1927 for oltraggio, the crime of uttering insults against public figures, Italian workman Aristido Beccatti owed a 300-lire fine. Upon being told of the situation, Benito Mussolini, the insulted public figure, sent Beccatti a 500-lire check.
Suetonius reported that Caligula often cheated when playing dice. The emperor once interrupted a game to go into the courtyard, where he spotted a group of rich knights passing. He had them arrested, stole their goods, then “resumed the game in high spirits, boasting that his luck had never been better.”
Primo Levi wrote that at Auschwitz “a large amount of alcohol was put at the disposal of” members of the Special Squad, inmates of the concentration camp who were forced to work the crematoriums, “and that they were in a permanent state of complete debasement and prostration.” One such inmate said, “Doing this work, one either goes crazy the first day or gets accustomed to it.”
A surgeon in the British navy published an 1816 treatise on “The Incubus, or Nightmare, Disturbed Sleep, Terrific Dreams, and Nocturnal Visions,” arguing against folk beliefs that nightmares resulted from overindulgence and sleeping on one’s back. Sufferers “can bear testimony to the distress and alarm,” he wrote, “in many cases rendering the approach of night a cause of terror, and life itself miserable.”
Neo-Confucian philosopher Fujiwara Seika visited a friend on the night of the Han mid-autumn festival in 1606. As the moon appeared, the men climbed onto the roof. “The guest felt in his heart the endlessness of space,” wrote Seika’s student Hayashi Razan, “but the host seemed not to notice this, so the guest also acted as if he had not either.” Drunk on wine just before dawn, the pair began asking questions of the moon. No answers came, Razan wrote: “What could the moon say?”
Along with an elephant whose name in Arabic meant “the father of intelligence,” Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid presented Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne with a mechanical clock powered by water in 807. At noon a weight dropped, bells sounded, and twelve brass horsemen emerged from twelve windows.
Southern women during the Civil War chewed on newspapers, believing an ingredient in the ink whitened their faces.
“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.
At a hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia, in 1952, a Dr. Hatcher tried to convince a Dr. Cranford to watch him perform a transorbital lobotomy. “Nothing to it,” Hatcher said. “I take a sort of medical ice pick, hold it like this, bop it through the bones just above the eyeball, push it up into the brain, swiggle it around, cut the brain fibers like this, and that’s it.” Cranford responded, “I was going to breakfast, but I’ve changed my mind.” Hatcher laughed. “You can change your mind,” he said, “but not like I can change it.”
Kobe beef, black truffles, seared foie gras, aged Gruyère cheese, wild mushrooms, and flakes of gold leaf, are most of the components that comprise the hamburger served at the Wall Street Burger Shoppe. Price: $175.
Charles Mackenzie, a fur trader in Missouri in 1805, noted that the local American Indians with whom he traded held a low opinion of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s party when it came through. “The Indians admired the air gun, as it could discharge forty shots out of one load,” Mackenzie reflected, “but they dreaded the magic of the owners. ‘Had I these white warriors in the upper plains,’ said the Gros Ventres chief, ‘my young men on horseback would soon do for them as they would do for so many wolves, for, there are only two sensible men among them, the worker of iron and the mender of guns.’” The “sensible men” in question included neither Lewis nor Clark.
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.”