Committed to learning the principles of Latin grammar as a child in Mexico in the 1650s, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz recalled that she cut her hair very short, and if she had not “learned such and such a thing” by the time it grew out, she “would again cut it off as punishment for being so slow-witted.”
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A character in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, which is set in the run-up to the July Revolution in France, says at one point, “Politics…is a stone tied round the neck of literature which submerges it in less than six months. Politics in the midst of imaginative matter is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is racking without being energetic. It does not harmonize with the sound of any instrument.”
“When a vision comes from the thunder beings of the West,” the Lakota heyoka Black Elk explained in 1932, “it comes with terror like a thunderstorm; but when the storm of vision has passed, the world is greener and happier; for wherever the truth of vision comes upon the world, it is like a rain. The world, you see, is happier after the terror of the storm.”
“There are observances necessary for a healthy man to employ during a pestilence,” advised the first-century Roman medical writer Aulus Cornelius Celsus, “although in spite of them, one cannot be secure.” Best of all is “to go abroad, take a voyage. When this cannot be, to be carried in a litter, walk in the open before the heat of the day, gently, and to be anointed in like manner.”
Each year from late August to October, thousands of male Oklahoma brown tarantulas travel through the prairieland of southeast Colorado in search of a mate. The spiders, which reach sexual maturity around the age of ten, often survive just one migration season. “Once they wander and mate, it gets cold,” said one entomologist. “They’ll be dead by Christmas.”
The mayor of Binalonan, a city in the Philippines, passed a law in 2019 banning gossip (chismis). Rumormongers face a two-hundred-peso fine and three hours of litter duty for a first-time offense. The mayor also banned karaoke after ten pm.
In order to economize while sending a telegram, people sometimes relied on code books that reduced phrases to single words. From the third version of Anglo-American Telegraphic Code, published in 1891: Babylonite (Please provide bail immediately), Titmouse (I [we] accept with pleasure your invitation for the theater tomorrow evening), Mahogany (Malaria prevails extensively), Enringed (the news causes great excitement).
“Pubic grooming has led to a severe depletion of crab-louse populations,” a medical entomologist with the company Insect Research & Development Ltd. said in an interview in January of this year. “Add to that other aspects of body-hair depilation, and you can see an environmental disaster in the making for this species.” More than 80 percent of college students in the U.S. remove all or part of their pubic hair.
The story of Juan Ponce de León searching for the Fountain of Youth in Florida in 1513 was fabricated after his death in a chronicle by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, a Spanish courtier who found the explorer to be egocentric, dim-witted, and gullible—and so wished to render him foolish in the annals.
During the 1679 plague of Vienna, a drunken balladeer named Marx Augustin passed out in a gutter. Gravediggers, mistaking him for dead, carried him beyond the city walls and threw him and his bagpipes into a pit filled with the bodies of plague victims. Upon waking the next day, Augustin was unable to get out of the mass grave. He played his bagpipes and was eventually rescued. “Ach, du Lieber Augustin,” a defiant song of loss based on his misadventure, remains a favorite in Vienna today. In 1908 composer Arnold Schoenberg quoted the folk song in the second movement of his String Quartet no. 2 in F-sharp Minor, op. 10.
Before the entire palette of modern mathematical notation existed, Johannes Kepler relied on musical notation to describe the planets’ rotation around the sun in his Harmonies of the World, published in 1619. The plus and minus signs were introduced in print in 1489 by Johann Widman, and the equal sign in 1557 by Robert Recorde, but the multiplication sign (×) was not introduced until 1631, by William Oughtred; modern exponential notation in 1637, by René Descartes; and the obelus (÷) to indicate division in 1659, by Johann Rahn.
Irving Berlin composed most of his songs in F-sharp major; the six sharp notes in the scale meant he could play the black keys of the piano almost exclusively. Eventually, for purposes of technical variety, he had a lever mechanism installed that allowed him to modulate into other keys without changing his playing.
In the eighteenth century, a cash-strapped French government began selling rente viagère, in which an investor paid an up-front sum pegged to someone’s life—sometimes the king or the pope—and received returns until death. A group of Genevan bankers diversified their portfolio in the 1770s by buying rente contracts on the lives of thirty wealthy young Genevan girls. The fund gained popularity; by 1789 a significant portion of French debt was owed on the lives of just these “thirty heads.”
While running the Vincent Astor Foundation, Brooke Astor established in 1991 an organization that provided furnishings to formerly homeless families, inspired by visits to two such families in Queens whose apartments were bare. “How can you build a new life if you don’t have any furniture?” Astor asked. “To move into a place and just sit there with a bag and not even have a teacup is terrible.”
One in four thousand people are said to suffer from photosensitive epilepsy, in which flashing computer screens can induce seizures. In 2008 the World Wide Web Consortium determined that online content should not flash more than three times in a one-second period. Federal government websites must design pages that avoid screen flickering within the range of 2 to 55 hertz.