A 2001 study in Science magazine found that matriarchal African elephants are essential to the well-being of elephant social groups because they possess social memories that enable them to recognize if outsiders are friendly to the herd. “Elephants can certainly build up a memory over the years and hold on to it,” said the study’s lead author.
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An estimated one in ten Europeans is conceived in an Ikea bed.
According to the Roman biographer Suetonius, the emperor Vespasian declined to use a labor-saving hoist in his construction projects. “To a mechanical engineer who promised to transport some heavy columns to the capitol at small expense, he gave no mean reward for his invention,” Suetonius writes, “but refused to make use of it, saying, ‘You must let me feed my poor commons.’ ”
To avoid the wrath of his lover’s father in Poland, Tadeusz Kościuszko went to America via France in 1776, later helping the colonists win the Battle of Saratoga and construct fortifications at West Point. At the end of the war, he was given U.S. citizenship and the army title of brigadier general.
Papal indulgences were brisk business for early printers, since they were single sheets and the type did not need to be reset. Between 1498 and 1500, the Benedictine monastery in Catalonia commissioned more than 200,000 indulgences from printers in the area. A total of two thousand single-sheet items survive from the whole of the fifteenth century; over one-third are indulgences.
In 1903, Mark Twain comforted Helen Keller, who had been accused of plagiarizing her story “The Frost King,” telling her in a letter, “All ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.” He took a harder line on his own intellectual property, however, campaigning so vigorously for stringent copyright laws that the American Bar Association later recognized him for his efforts.
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.”
When a theologian renting from ninth-century Islamic philosopher al-Kindi hosted two cousins for a monthlong visit, the landlord increased the rent proportionally. His reasoning: a dwelling has a “limited existence.” A tenant enjoys this without the burden of ownership, then leaves the space “a dung heap and in dilapidation, only repairable at grievous expense.”
In the Finnish runic epic Kalevala, Loviatar, the daughter of the god of death, is impregnated by the wind and gives birth to nine diseases: Consumption, Colic, Gout, Rickets, Ulcer, Scab, Cancer, Plague, and an unnamed disease, “the worst of the nine,” who is banished by his mother “to bewitch the lowland people, / to engender strife and envy.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement returned nearly four thousand ancient Iraqi artifacts in 2018 that Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma City–based chain of craft stores owned by an evangelical Christian family, had purchased from dealers in the United Arab Emirates. A year later investigators alleged that the Museum of the Bible, founded by the same family, had in its holdings thirteen artifacts belonging to the Egypt Exploration Society. The museum said it would return the artifacts.
In love with the same slave girl, Iris, two men in first-century Pompeii fought via graffiti. Severus tagged the wall first, writing that Iris did not love Successus, adding, “His rival wrote this.” Successus responded, “Don’t even think to speak badly of a man more handsome than you, especially one who is both most vicious when crossed and yet also good.” “I have written all there is to say,” Severus retorted. “You love Iris, but she does not love you.”
The Athenian orator Lysias, a generation younger than Antiphon—who pioneered the business of writing defense speeches—once upset a litigant, according to Plutarch, for whom he had prepared a defense, because the first time the man read the speech it “seemed to him wonderfully good, but on taking it up a second and third time it appeared completely dull and ineffectual.” After hearing the man out, Lysias replied, “Well, isn’t it only once that you are going to speak it before the jurors?”
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.”
Statistician Stephen Stigler wrote in 1980, “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” He identified this as a basic law of eponymy, admitted he was an “outsider to the sociology of science” acting in “flagrant violation of the institutional norms of humility,” and named the law after himself.
The questions “Have you ever used Derbisol?” and “How often?” sometimes appear along with questions about alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana use on youth-risk surveys for students. Derbisol is a fictitious drug devised to test the reliability of the responder. In one survey, 163 of 894 students said that they had tried Derbisol—or 18.2 percent.