Students at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich wrote to Carl Jung in 1949 to ask what effect he thought technology had on the human psyche. “The danger lies not in technology,” Jung responded, “but in the possibilities awaiting discovery.” The question regarding new discoveries was “whether man is sufficiently equipped with reason to be able to resist the temptation to use them for destructive purposes.” This, Jung concluded, “experience alone can answer.”
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In November 1934 a team of American baseball stars, including Babe Ruth, toured Japan. When they arrived for a game in the town of Narashino, each man was presented with a horseshoe-shaped flower wreath. Ruth detested the gift; he later told a Japanese baseball magazine that he considered such wreaths bad luck and had never hit a home run after receiving one.
When the British Petroleum oil rig Deepwater Horizon was forced to shut down temporarily because of a gas surge, one engineer tried to persuade his colleagues that a liner was required to secure the pipe. The proposal, which would have cost about $7 million, was rejected by management. “This has been a nightmare well which has everyone all over the place,” the engineer wrote to a colleague. Six days later, on April 20, 2010, the rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico and spilled more than four million barrels of oil before it was capped almost three months later.
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.
In the Texas border town of Lajitas, generations of goats named Clay Henry have since 1986 served as mayor from a pen outside the general store, where passersby often stop to give them beer. In 2001 a local man became envious that Clay Henry III was allowed to drink alcohol on Sunday in the blue law–abiding county. “The next morning,” the local sheriff reported, “the goat was found lying with its testicles cut off.”
In 2011 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals filed a lawsuit against SeaWorld alleging that five orcas were being held as slaves in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution; it is believed to be the first legal filing arguing that the amendment applies to nonhumans. The orcas, named as plaintiffs in the case, had been caught in the wild and were being used in performances in Florida and California. “Slavery is slavery, and it does not depend on the species of the slave any more than it depends on gender, race, or religion,” PETA’s counsel said. The following year, the judge ruled that the amendment does not protect nonhumans.
Tacitus reports in his Annals that Nero’s “passion for extravagance” brought disrepute and danger in the year 60 when the emperor went bathing in the spring that fed the Aqua Marcia, the aqueduct believed to deliver Rome’s healthiest drinking water. Nero “profaned the sacred waters,” complains Tacitus, and “the divine anger was confirmed by a grave illness that followed.”
The city of Baltimore has a history of election riots, but the rise of the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s further exacerbated election violence. One affiliated gang, the Blood Tubs, took barrels of blood from butchers, threw Germans and Irishmen into them, and then chased the bloodied victims down the street. By 1856 Know-Nothings had won local, state, and national contests.
The first ruler of a unified Chinese empire and father of the Great Wall, Emperor Shihuangdi commissioned a twenty-square-mile mausoleum, which took around 700,000 laborers more than thirty-five years to complete. Inside, there were about eight thousand terracotta soldiers, seventy burial sites, a zoo, and weapons triggered to go off in case of robbers. The chief craftsmen, it is believed, were also buried there to prevent them from betraying construction secrets.
“I look at the jury and they won’t look at me,” testified Charles Manson during his 1970 trial for conspiracy to murder. “They are afraid of me. And do you know why they are afraid of me? Because of the newspapers. You projected fear. You projected fear. You made me a monster, and I have to live with that the rest of my life.”
A common belief in antiquity was that bees were born of decaying ox flesh. Virgil instructs in his Georgics to stop up a young bullock’s nostrils and mouth, beat it “to a pulp through the unbroken hide,” shut the carcass in a small room to ferment, and await the bees that will burst out “like a shower pouring from summer clouds.”
“A republican state based upon universal suffrage,” wrote the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in 1869, “could be exceedingly despotic, even more despotic than a monarchic state when, under the pretext of representing the will of everyone, it bears down upon the will and the free movement of every one of its members.”
“Just opposite, an island of the sea, / There came enchantment with the shifting wind, / That did both drown and keep alive my ears,” wrote John Keats in Hyperion. It was published in a collection of poems in 1820; Keats died the following year. In 1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley, returning from a visit to Lord Byron, drowned after his schooner, the Don Juan, capsized. His body washed up on the Tuscan shore a few days later. In his pocket was a copy of Keats’ poems.
As a young man studying in Amsterdam, Vincent van Gogh on August 18, 1877, wrote to his brother Theo, “I breakfasted on a piece of dry bread and a glass of beer—that is what Dickens advises for those who are on the point of committing suicide, as being a good way to keep them, at least for some time, from their purpose.”
“You don’t need a brain to sleep” was a central takeaway for a team of biologists who found that Cassiopea, a genus of upside-down jellyfish, display signs of sleep deprivation when disturbed by water pulses at twenty-minute intervals throughout the night.