“It is a sign of rain,” wrote the author of the fourth-century-bc Greek treatise On Weather Signs, “if a hawk perches on a tree, flies right into it, and proceeds to search for lice. Also, when in summer a number of birds living on an island pack together, if a moderate number collect, it is a good sign for goats and flocks, while if the number is exceedingly large, it portends a severe drought.”
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Shortly before Ezra Pound was indicted for treason for his anti-American broadcasts on Benito Mussolini’s Radio Rome, Ernest Hemingway wrote to poet Archibald MacLeish, “If Ezra has any sense he should shoot himself. Personally I think he should have shot himself somewhere along after the twelfth canto, although maybe earlier.”
“Six days, six weeks. I doubt six months,” said Donald Rumsfeld, on February 7, 2003, about the duration of the Iraq war. “Whatever happens in Vietnam, I can conceive of nothing except military victory,” Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1967. Four years before that, Robert McNamara asserted, “The war in Vietnam is going well and will succeed.”
After watching a performance of his play Peter Pan with his five-year-old godson, J. M. Barrie asked the boy what he had liked best. “What I think I liked best,” the boy replied, “was tearing up the program and dropping the bits on people’s heads.”
Corporations, wrote Edward Coke in a 1613 legal decision, “have no souls,” for they are “invisible, immortal, and resteth only in intendment and consideration of the law.” A corporate body, Coke argued, can’t “do fealty, for an invisible body cannot be in person, nor can swear.”
“Why do you wrong the gods so much?” Greek poet Athenaeus asks a sober party guest in a late second-century work. “You’re no use to the city if you drink water, / because you’re hurting the farmer and the trader; / whereas I increase their income by getting drunk.”
The year 1816 became known as the “Year Without a Summer” because the previous year’s weeklong eruption of Mount Tambora, in Indonesia, clouded the sky with volcanic ash and sulphate aerosols, lowering the earth’s surface temperature for years to come. After thousands of horses either starved to death or were slaughtered for food, transportation and industry across much of Europe began to fail. Around 1817, Karl von Drais, a German nobleman, experimented with wheel arrangements and came up with his two-wheel Laufmaschine (“running machine”), an early precursor to the bicycle.
Research conducted using the Migrant Acceptance Index, a metric developed by Gallup to assess the emotional impact of immigration on both migrants and native-born populations, found that newcomers to countries with the lowest migrant-acceptance scores rated their lives more positively than did native-born residents, but this positivity faded the longer migrants stayed. In countries with high acceptance scores, longtime migrants expressed more optimism about the future than either native-born residents or newly arrived migrants.
“The movements of the air and water,” wrote French mathematician Joseph Fourier in 1824, “the extent of the oceans, the elevation and form of the surface, the effects of human industry, and all the accidental changes of the earth’s surface modify the temperature of each climate.”
“Waters from snow and ice are all bad,” opined Hippocrates of Cos around 400 bc. “Once frozen, water never recovers its original nature, but the clear, light, sweet part is separated out and disappears.” Such melted waters, he declared, “are the worst for all purposes.”
Animal cognition researcher Irene Pepperberg wrote in her study of the African gray parrot Alex that the intelligent bird often became restless when asked to focus on a single task: “He will cease to work, begin to preen, or interrupt with many successive requests.” In 1996 Alex appeared on the television show Turning Point to demonstrate that he could name the colors, shapes, sizes, and materials of different objects. In the middle of this exercise, he began to respond to Pepperberg’s questions with remarks like “Want to go back” and “Want to go eat dinner.”
“I am not exactly pleased with the Atlantic,” Oscar Wilde is said to have remarked to a fellow passenger aboard the Arizona in 1881. “The sea seems tame to me. The roaring ocean does not roar.” A newspaper subsequently ran the headline: “Mr. Wilde Disappointed with Atlantic.”
Referring to the printers’ strike that began in St. Petersburg in 1905 and helped to inaugurate the October Revolution, Leon Trotsky wrote, “They demanded a shorter working day and a higher piecework rate per thousand letters set, not excluding punctuation marks. This small event set off nothing more nor less than the all-Russian political strike—that is, a strike which started over punctuation marks and ended by felling absolutism.”
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 May 2020 a preliminary staff report of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York looked at several historical data sets from Germany and concluded that influenza mortality in 1918–20 caused significant societal change in the subsequent decade. Influenza deaths were associated with lower per-capita spending, especially on services consumed by the young, and were correlated with the share of votes for extremist parties in the elections of 1932 and 1933.