According to Pliny, after an oracle predicted Aeschylus would die from being hit by a falling house, the poet began “trusting himself only under the canopy of the heavens.” His precaution was futile; he was killed that day when hit by a tortoise dropped from the sky by a hungry eagle eager to crack open its shell.
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Wikipedia editing guidelines ask that page authors avoid including mission statements in entries. “These usually focus on platitudes rather than specifics,” the site warns. “In short, they rarely tell us anything useful.”
In August 2018 data scientist David Bamman examined how authors recently interviewed in the New York Times’ By the Book column answered the question “What’s on your nightstand?” Women mentioned male and female authors almost equally; men mentioned male authors more than 79 percent of the time. “Don’t read in bed,” advised Fran Lebowitz. “It’s too stimulating. Watch TV instead. It’s boring.”
In his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laërtius tells of Socrates’ disciple Aristippus, who “derived pleasure from what was present, and did not toil to procure the enjoyment of something not present.” Such opportunism was not widely admired; Aristippus was sometimes called “the king’s poodle.”
“It was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote of his failed 1965 master’s thesis in anthropology, in which he argued that the plots of stories, when graphed, conform to a set of standard patterns. “The apathy of the University of Chicago is repulsive to me. They can take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooooooon.”
Philadelphia chemist Robert Cornelius took what is widely believed to be the first “selfie,” in the back of his family shop, by removing the camera lens cap, running into the frame, and then replacing the lens cap. On the back of the photograph he wrote, “The first light picture ever taken. 1839.” Three-quarters of a century later, Russia’s grand duchess Anastasiya Nikolayevna took a series of self-portraits, steadying herself on the back of a chair. “I took this picture of myself looking in the mirror,” she wrote in 1914, four years before her execution. “It was very hard, as my hands were trembling.”
Irving Berlin composed most of his songs in F-sharp major; the six sharp notes in the scale meant he could play the black keys of the piano almost exclusively. Eventually, for purposes of technical variety, he had a lever mechanism installed that allowed him to modulate into other keys without changing his playing.
In Natural Theology, published in 1802, William Paley posited that there was a difference between finding a stone and a watch on the ground. He wrote, “the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer: who comprehended its construction and designed its use.” Paley used the watchmaker analogy to justify the existence of God.
In 1983 the National Commission on Excellence in Education produced the report A Nation at Risk, which urged educational reforms such as assigning more homework to students. Three years later, educational researcher Bill Barber protested that homework was “peripheral” to the nation’s problems. “We are nothing but amateurs if the best we can muster up for students,” he wrote, “is a recommendation that they ought to get more of the same thing.”
A scientific study found that hurricanes given feminine names tend to be deadlier than those given masculine names; people consider them less risky and take inadequate precautions. “Changing a severe hurricane’s name from Charley to Eloise,” the study notes, “could nearly triple its death toll.”
In an 1846 math textbook from the Free Grammar School of King Edward VI, one exercise considers an exchange of 450 bags of potatoes for cash, 15 chests of oranges, and 185 bushels of carrots; the remainder is nuts. The question is posed: “How many bags of nuts did I receive?”
“Bomb the shit out of them!” was reportedly a drunken President Richard Nixon’s conclusion as to what should be done about Cambodia. Henry Kissinger recalled in an interview in 1999 that “two glasses of wine were quite enough to make him boisterous, just one more to grow bellicose or sentimental with slurred speech.”
Sixteenth-century “father of mineralogy” Georgius Agricola critiqued “these attacks, which are so annoying,” made by those protesting how mining exterminated animals and poisoned brooks and streams. “With the metals that are melted from the ore,” he explained, “birds without number, edible beasts, and fish can be purchased elsewhere and brought to these mountainous regions.”
Waves generated by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 reached the shores of Peru and Nova Scotia.
A third-century collection of Roman jurisprudence includes sentences for adulterers: a woman is to be exiled to an island; a man, “punished by a similar exile to an island.” Later scholars clarified: the man’s exile is “presumably to a different island from that of the woman.”