At the start of the French Revolution, the physician Jean-Paul Marat began publishing an antimonarchical journal in which he called the king’s minister of finance “the cruelest adversary of freedom.” In 1790 the Marquis de Lafayette dispatched thousands of soldiers to arrest Marat, even stationing them on rooftops in case Marat, an aviation enthusiast, attempted to escape by balloon. While the legality of the warrant was being disputed, Marat wrote and published a pamphlet mocking these extravagant efforts before making a quiet escape.
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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.”
When Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy discovered that with radioactivity one atom can be transformed into another, Soddy recalled blurting out “Rutherford, this is transmutation: the thorium is disintegrating and transmuting itself into argon gas.” As “the words seemed to flash through” Soddy “as if from some outside force,” Rutherford replied, “For Mike’s sake, Soddy, don’t call it transmutation. They’ll have our heads off as alchemists.”
In the weeks surrounding Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler, the minister of culture, eight of forty-one party regional leaders, fourteen of ninety-eight Luftwaffe generals, and eleven of fifty-three admirals committed suicide. In Berlin, 3,881 Germans killed themselves in April alone; 7,057 suicides were reported by the end of the year.
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.
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.
The opening of a particle accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 2000 inspired fears that high-speed collisions might launch a chain reaction that could turn the earth into a hyperdense sphere about one hundred meters across. A risk calculation determined this to be unlikely; if the collider were to run for ten years, the chance was no greater than 1 in 50 million. “The word unlikely, however many times it is repeated,” wrote concerned scientists, “just isn’t enough to assuage our fears of this total disaster.”
Archaeologists studying large-scale fishing operations in medieval Europe found that changes in marine fishing in England between 600 and 1600 occurred rapidly around 1000 and involved significant catches of herring and cod. “This revolution predated the documented postmedieval expansion of England’s sea fisheries,” they concluded. “The century between 950 and 1050 can now be pinpointed as the ultimate origin of today’s fishing crisis.”
Not long before his death in 961, Umayyad caliph Abd al-Rahman III testified that over his fifty years of reign, during which “riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call,” he had “diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness.” Al-Rahman had counted only fourteen. “O man,” he lamented, “place not thy confidence in this present world!”
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.’ ”
After “a certain knight shamefully divulged the intimacies and the secrets” of his lover, André Le Chapelain wrote in his late twelfth-century The Art of Courtly Love, an ad hoc tribunal of noble Gascon women “decided unanimously that forever after he should be deprived of all hope of love, and that in every court of ladies or of knights he should be an object of contempt and abuse to all.”
In one of the earliest references to the tragedy of the commons—a concept that describes how people use natural resources to their advantage without considering the cost to society—the economist William Forster Lloyd asked in 1833, “Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so bare-worn and cropped so differently from adjoining enclosures?”
In Confucianism the five cardinal human relationships (wulun) are love between fathers and sons, righteousness between rulers and subjects, difference between husbands and wives, seniority between older and younger brothers, and trust between friends. Though at the bottom of this hierarchy, friendship is the only relationship not determined by ranking or kinship.
In the winter of 1878, Friedrich Nietzsche diagnosed himself with “Baselophobia.” After slipping on black ice, developing constant headaches and a finger infection, and suffering a nine-day stretch of persistent vomiting, he had become convinced the city of Basel was killing him. His sister, Elisabeth, blamed his illness instead on his attempt “to imitate Diogenes” by practicing dietary asceticism.
In 1967 Bobby and Ethel Kennedy participated in the tenth annual Hudson River Whitewater Derby. Bobby’s kayak capsized in the freezing water; he was hurtled down the rapids. The next day Ethel attempted the course, accompanied by a ski expert and a mountain guide; the trio’s canoe tipped over three times. “A rescue party’s been sent up the river to get Mrs. Kennedy, who is on a rock,” an announcer told those waiting at the finish. “She’s having a bad day.”