“Against the fashionable (and idiotic) claim that revenge is just hardwired and an instinctual response programmed into our genes and neuro-structures,” argues law professor William Ian Miller in an analysis of Njál’s Saga, “actual Icelandic feuding” rather “made it preferable for revenge to be served up cold; take your time and think. Only the stupid hit back right away.”
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Before their journey westward in America in 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were advised by Thomas Jefferson to “observe the animals” and especially “the remains and accounts of any which may be deemed rare or extinct.” One of the animal fossils that the expedition sent back is believed to have been of a dinosaur, dating from the Cretaceous Period.
“He whose meat in this world do I eat,” reads the Hindu Laws of Manu, “will in the other world me eat.” Another verse simply warns not to “behave like the flesh-eating ghouls.”
Vladimir Nabokov referred to Thomas Mann once as a “quack” and to Ezra Pound as “that total fake.”
When Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi was found guilty of corruption and fraud in 1975 by the Allahabad High Court, she instituted a state of emergency to control the opposition, suspending elections and arresting dissidents. She cabled world leaders to defend her decision, after which the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office declared that “an authoritarian regime is better equipped than a democracy” to “make India less of a burden on the world” and increased British aid to India by over 30 percent.
“Among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal,” poet John Berryman told an interviewer in 1970, two years before his death. “Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.”
Edith Wharton’s childhood German tutor, Anna Bahlmann, also taught her English and American literature; Norse, Greek, and Roman mythology; and history, art, and architecture. In 1878 Wharton called Bahlmann her “supreme critic” in a letter. Bahlmann is mentioned only four times in Wharton’s memoir and only once by name. One scholar suggested that Wharton’s “conviction about her intellectual and artistic isolation…compelled her to deny her closeness to her teacher.”
In a June 2019 article published in Nature Climate Change, researchers concluded that the “northernmost spatial regime boundary” for birds in the Great Plains of North America has shifted to the north by more than 350 miles over the past forty-six years, an indication of rapid global change. “Climate change, anthropogenic pressures, wildfire trends, and woody plant invasions,” according to the researchers, “have all operated along a putatively south-to-north trajectory over the past decades.”
Having gained fame in England as a mind reader, Maud Lancaster came to New York City to perform in 1893. Nellie Bly, investigating for the New York World, quickly discovered that Lancaster’s telepathy act involved a confederate giving secret signals. Bly donned a blindfold, performed the signature trick herself, and published a front-page exposé about the events under a headline reading “Miss Lancaster, Who Astonished All London, Finds the World ’s Young Woman Too Much for Her.”
“Ten dolphins are now being trained for special tasks in the Ukrainian state oceanarium, and the Ukrainian military are regularly training the animals for detecting things on the seabed,” a military official told a Russian newspaper in 2012. The source went on to say that some dolphins would be trained to combat enemy swimmers, using special knives or pistols affixed to their heads. The Ukrainian Defense Ministy later denied the program’s existence.
“The image you get from reading the Roe v. Wade opinion is it’s mostly a doctor’s-rights case—a doctor’s right to prescribe what he thinks his patient needs,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in a 2018 interview with legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen. “My idea of how choice should have developed was not a privacy notion, not a doctor’s-right notion, but a woman’s right to control her own destiny, to be able to make choices without a Big Brother state telling her what she can and cannot do.”
Primo Levi wrote that at Auschwitz “a large amount of alcohol was put at the disposal of” members of the Special Squad, inmates of the concentration camp who were forced to work the crematoriums, “and that they were in a permanent state of complete debasement and prostration.” One such inmate said, “Doing this work, one either goes crazy the first day or gets accustomed to it.”
Ellen Eglin, a housekeeper working in Washington, DC, devised a clothes wringer in 1888 to make washing and drying more efficient. Instead of patenting her invention, she sold the rights to an agent for eighteen dollars, bringing the new owner “great financial success,” according to an 1890 article. “If it was known that a Negro woman patented the invention, white ladies would not buy the wringer,” she told the reporter.
The first Olympic champion on record, Coroebus, was a cook. He won the sprint in 776 BC.
“Waters from snow and ice are all bad,” opined Hippocrates of Cos around 400 bc. “Once frozen, water never recovers its original nature, but the clear, light, sweet part is separated out and disappears.” Such melted waters, he declared, “are the worst for all purposes.”