British historian Orlando Figes admitted in 2010 to posting scathing reviews on Amazon for books by other Russian-history specialists. Using the name Historian, he called one work “dense and pretentious” and complained another was not “worth the bother of ploughing through its dreadful prose.” Of Figes’ own The Whisperers, Historian posted that it “leaves the reader awed, humbled, yet uplifted” and wrote of its author, “I hope he writes forever.”
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In 1919 a steel storage tank burst in Boston and spilled 2.3 million gallons of molasses, creating a twenty-five-foot-high wave that killed twenty-one people and tore buildings from foundations. The tank had leaked since its installation, but the company had, in response to complaints, merely painted it a concealing brown.
According to philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “Writing was an invention which took about two thousand years to make its effect felt. Do you recall, even in Plato’s dialogues, the discussions are seldom if ever about what the participants have ‘read’ but almost invariably about what they ‘remember’?”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who gave thirty so-called fireside chats over twelve years, was afraid of fire and refused to lock his door while sleeping so as to ensure easy escape, which he would often practice by dropping quickly from his bed or chair and crawling to the exit.
In Japanese tradition, ghosts and spirits are more likely to appear at dusk or dawn than in the middle of the night. “In order for people to see them and be frightened by them,” wrote folklorist Kunio Yanagita, “emerging in the pitch-dark after even the plants have fallen asleep is, to say the least, just not good business practice.”
“Darkness has come upon me,” a hymn in the Rig Veda laments. “O Dawn, banish it like a debt.” The morning light is here asked, suggested translator Wendy Doniger, to act as a collection agency—to “make good what darkness had incurred or ‘exact’ the darkness from night as one would exact money.”
Color film in the 1950s barely registered dark skin tones; Kodak had developed the product to measure images against the white skin of a model known as Shirley. The company eventually modified its film emulsion, responding to complaints from advertisers promoting wood furniture and chocolate.
The verb ostracize derives from the Greek word ostracon, a potsherd on which each citizen wrote the name of one well-known citizen whom they wished to banish from the polis. The first published use of the word in English dates from 1649, in a poetic elegy to young Lord Hastings, a Royalist supporter of Charles I: “Therefore the Democratic stars did rise,/And all that worth from hence did ostracize.” The author was Andrew Marvell, who, not long after, served in Oliver Cromwell’s commonwealth government along with the secretary for foreign tongues, John Milton.
In the Himalayan valley of Kullu, in Himachal Pradesh, there sits a Shiva temple on whose property is erected a sixty-foot iron pole. According to an ancient tradition, the pole attracts the “blessing of heaven,” and a Shiva lingam is placed underneath. During storms the pole acts as a lightning rod, carrying electricity down to the lingam and shattering the object. The broken pieces are collected by the temple priest and used for the next blessing.
Thirtieth U.S. president Calvin Coolidge, nicknamed “Silent Cal,” once sat next to a woman at a dinner party who reportedly said to him, “I have made a bet, Mr. Coolidge, that I could get more than two words out of you.” To which he replied, “You lose.”
A fourteenth-century-bc peace treaty recorded on a cuneiform tablet contains an invocation to Mithra, the Indo-Iranian god of the sun as well as of oaths and mutual obligation. In the Roman Empire, Mithras was honored as the god of loyalty to the emperor, while in Indian Vedic texts, he represents friendship and benevolence and, along with the god Varuna, is entrusted with the maintenance of the gods’ essence.
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.”
As a member of a Cherokee delegation to Washington, DC, Sam Houston wore traditional loincloth and blanket to an 1818 meeting with Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, who was offended and chastised Houston for his dress. Twenty-two years later, between terms as president of the Republic of Texas, Houston wore such a blanket to meet Jean Pierre Isidore Alphonse Dubois, comte de Saligny, in Austin.
Derived from the French bouder (to pout or sulk), the word boudoir once meant “a place to pout in.” “I have a boudoir, but it has one fault,” the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to a female companion in 1748. “It is so cheerful and so pleasant that there will be no such thing as pouting in it when I am alone.” Its “fault,” he added, could be remedied “by introducing those clumsy, tiresome, and disagreeable people whom I am obliged to admit now and then.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow attended Bowdoin College—both class of 1825—at the same time as Franklin Pierce, who was a year ahead of them. The fourteenth president of the United States was at Hawthorne’s side when the author died in 1864. Longfellow served as a pallbearer at the funeral.