Puréed applesauce—the first food eaten in outer space, by John Glenn in 1962. Shrimp cocktail, macaroni and cheese, candy-coated peanuts, Metamucil wafers—among what he ate thirty-six years later aboard the spaceship Discovery.
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Pantagruelian feasts, common at Gallo-Roman villas, followed the Gallic custom of eating around a table rather than the Roman method of doing so while lying down supported by one elbow. After one banquet, it was recorded that all “remained seated on their benches. They had drunk so much wine and had so gorged themselves that the slaves and the guests lay drunk in every corner of the house, wherever they happened to stumble.”
In the 1860s editor William Bullock invented a printing press that used continuous-roll paper; it made double-sided copies in mass quantities and transformed publishing. Two years later Bullock got his leg stuck in the press’ belt mechanism while installing one at a Philadelphia newspaper, developed gangrene, underwent an amputation, and died during the operation.
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.
While on his deathbed in 1849, the Japanese artist Hokusai said to those gathered around him that he wished he could live another ten years. He paused, and went on: “If I had another five years, even, I could have become a real painter.” Then he died, at the age of eighty-nine.
The Hungarian American physicist Leo Szilard first conceived of the nuclear chain reaction—a crucial milestone in the development of the atomic bomb—on a gray London morning in September 1933 while waiting for a traffic light to change from red to green. “It suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element…which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron,” he wrote, this element could “liberate energy on an industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs.” In his book on the history of the bomb, historian Richard Rhodes writes that “as he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world.”
A greenish-brown, diamond-twill, boat-neck wool sweater woven between 230 and 380 and worn by a reindeer hunter was discovered by researchers in 2013. The tunic, which was mended with two patches, had been preserved in the Norwegian Lendbreen glacier and would have fit a slender man of about 5'9". “The hunter,” said researcher Lise Bender Jørgensen, “looked after his clothing.”
About how statements get written up by the press, Andy Warhol wrote, “It would always be different from what I’d actually said—and a lot more fun for me to read. Like if I’d said, ‘In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,’ it could come out ‘In fifteen minutes everyone will be famous.’ ” About the future, Andy Warhol also wrote, “I really do live for the future, because when I’m eating a box of candy, I can’t wait to taste the last piece. I don’t even taste any of the other pieces.”
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.”
“When the maids are beautiful and the concubines charming, this is not a blessing,” warns Confucian master Zhu Bolu in a seventeenth-century work of household advice. “For servants,” his next maxim advises, “don’t employ handsome boys.”
A 2013 study involving American college students found that participants were more likely to deem a face more attractive if it was presented amid a group of faces than if it was displayed alone. This “cheerleader effect,” scientists ventured, was “due to the averaging out of unattractive idiosyncrasies.” Two years later a similar study conducted with Japanese participants failed to replicate the results of the initial study.
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.”
As a child in Mexico in the 1650s, the nun and writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz “abstained from eating cheese because I had heard that it made one slow of wits, for in me the desire for learning was stronger than the desire for eating—as powerful as that is in children.”
The critic Vladimir Stassov recalled that when the composers Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Modest Mussorgsky “were still young men living together in one room…The piano could be heard, and the singing would start, and with great excitement and bustle they would show me what they had composed the previous day, or the day before or the day before that—how wonderful it was."
While stationed as a secret agent in Bern in 1917, future CIA director Allen W. Dulles received a phone call from a Russian exile with an urgent message to deliver to the United States. Having already arranged a rendezvous with Swiss twin sisters at a country inn, Dulles demurred, finding out only later that the caller was Vladimir Lenin, who returned to Russia in a sealed train the next day.