Gioachino Rossini was known to possess strong opinions about other composers. “Wagner has some fine moments,” he estimated, “but some bad quarters of an hour.” After hearing Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, he remarked, “What a good thing it isn’t music.”
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In 1995 cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus conducted a study in which she presented to twenty-four people four stories about their childhoods. Three of the stories were true; one was false. Five of the twenty-four people falsely remembered the “lost in a mall” story. “People can be led to remember their past in different ways,” concluded Loftus, “and they even can be led to remember entire events that never actually happened to them.”
Andean legends tell of pishtacos, bogeymen who steal their victims’ fat. In colonial times they were said to be Franciscan monks who used the fat as church-bell grease or holy oil. By the 1960s they were sometimes represented as workers who used it to lubricate modern factory machinery or airplane engines.
When Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger in June 1928, the New York Sun ran an article with the headline MISS EARHARD SPURNS FASHIONS: SHE CARES LITTLE ABOUT CLOTHES, DOES NOT USE LIPSTICK—LIKES TO FENCE AND DRIVE CAR. “Flying is a perfectly natural thing in her opinion,” it read, “and requires no special togs: a dress is as good air equipment as trousers.”
Japanese athletic-footwear company Onitsuka Tiger changed its name in 1977 to ASICS, an acronym of the Latin phrase anima sana in corpore sano, “a sound soul in a sound body,” altering a line from one of Juvenal’s satires. “If you must pray for something,” wrote the poet, “then ask for a sound mind in a sound body.”
Plutarch related that news of the Athenians’ brutal defeat at Syracuse during the Peloponnesian Wars first came from a stranger who told the story at a barbershop “as if the Athenians already knew all about it.” When the barber spread the news, city leaders branded him a liar and an agitator. He was “fastened to the wheel and racked a long time.” Official messengers later came with the “actual facts of the whole disaster,” and the barber was released.
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.
While minister to France in 1778, Benjamin Franklin met Voltaire at the Academy of the Sciences. On hand was John Adams, who wrote that “neither of our philosophers seemed to divine what was wished or expected” of them by the crowd. Eventually, the two embraced and kissed each other on the cheek, an act that Nicolas de Condorcet said provoked such enthusiastic approval that “it was said to be Solon who embraced Sophocles.”
In 1864, responding to his friend Victor Hugo’s invitation to visit Guernsey, where the writer was living in exile, the French painter Gustave Courbet wrote, “In your sympathetic retreat I will contemplate the spectacle of your sea. The viewpoints of our mountains also offer us the limitless spectacle of immensity. The unfillable void has a calming effect. I confess, poet, I love terra firma and the orchestration of the countless herds that inhabit our mountains. The sea! The sea with its charms saddens me. In its joyful moods, it makes me think of a laughing tiger; in its sad moods, it recalls the crocodile’s tears and, in its roaring fury, the caged monster that cannot swallow me up.”
“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.”
On July 23, 1995, in New Mexico, the astronomer Alan Hale saw an unidentified fuzzy object in the sky. He emailed the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams. In Arizona, Tom Bopp saw the same thing. He telegrammed the bureau. The comet was named Hale-Bopp the following day. Believing that a UFO was traveling behind it, thirty-eight members of The Heaven’s Gate cult committed suicide on March 26, 1997, six days before the comet reached its perihelion.
Gone to Greece to fight for the country’s liberation from Ottoman rule, Lord Byron, who financed a fighting force, noted in his journal on September 28, 1823, that he “did not come to join a faction but a nation—and to deal with honest men” and was dismayed to find that “they are such d——d liars; there never was such an incapacity for veracity shown since Eve lived in Paradise.” Nevertheless, he died there on April 19, 1824, after contracting a fever.
The bark of Cinchona trees (from which quinine is obtained) was first described as a remedy for malaria by Jesuit missionaries in Peru. Protestant hostility toward Jesuits, however, led to a distrust of “Peruvian bark” in England. An apothecary’s apprentice named Robert Talbor warned patients to “beware of all palliative cures and especially that known by the name of Jesuits’ powder,” instead offering his own secret remedy. His treatment was highly effective, earning him a fortune. A year after his death, his “English remedy” was revealed to be an infusion of cinchona powder mixed with opium and wine.
Egyptian pop singer Sherine Abdel-Wahab was sentenced to six months in prison in 2018 for insulting the Nile. Asked by a fan to perform her hit song “Have You Drunk from the Nile?,” Abdel-Wahab responded, “You are better off drinking Evian,” informing the fan that the waters of the Nile can lead to schistosomiasis, a disease also known as snail fever, which has plagued Egypt for so long that strains have been found in excavated pharaonic-era mummies.
George Romero, who pioneered the modern zombie film in 1968, complained in 2010 that he’d “never had a zombie eat a brain, but it’s become this landmark thing.” The trope was introduced in 1985 by Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead, in which a zombie woman explains that eating brains relieves the “pain of being dead.” Some fans have speculated this is due to the brain’s high levels of serotonin.