“As a young man, he was totally asexual,” Luis Buñuel recalled of Salvador Dalí, elaborating in a parenthetical comment, “Of course, he’s seduced many, particularly American heiresses; but those seductions usually entailed stripping them naked in his apartment, frying a couple of eggs, putting them on the women’s shoulders, and, without a word, showing them to the door.”
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Suetonius, a biographer of Roman emperors, claimed that the violent ruler Tiberius had a clifftop location in Capri from which he liked to watch his victims thrown into the sea. “A party of marines were stationed below,” Suetonius wrote, “and when the bodies came hurtling down, they whacked at them with oars and boathooks, to make sure that they were completely dead.”
An ongoing international study of people who have survived severe cardiac arrest has led researchers to believe that the brain experiences a “hyper-alerted state” after clinical death. This means, they theorize, that consciousness could continue after the body stops showing signs of life; a person may be able to hear and perceive the pronouncement of their own death.
The second of the 282 laws in the Code of Hammurabi, dating from the eighteenth century bc, states, “If a man charge a man with sorcery, and cannot prove it, he who is charged with sorcery shall go to the river; into the river he shall throw himself, and if the river overcome him, his accuser shall take to himself his house. If the river show that man to be innocent, and he come forth unharmed, he who charged him with sorcery shall be put to death.”
8.5.2
James Boswell recorded that during the sale of Henry Thrale’s brewery, Samuel Johnson—an executor of the business—“appeared bustling about, with an inkhorn and pen in his buttonhole, like an exciseman,” and was asked what he considered to be the true value of the property. “We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats,” Johnson responded, “but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”
At a seance in the White House in 1862, Nettie Colburn Maynard, the medium, recalled that, after losing consciousness, she, channeling Daniel Webster, spoke for over an hour, during which President Abraham Lincoln was assured that the Emancipation Proclamation he had written but not signed would be “the crowning event of his administration and life” and that he needed to “stand firm” against dissenters. Arthur Conan Doyle later speculated that it “may have been one of the most important [moments] in the history of the United States.”
In 1942 a contaminated yellow-fever vaccine caused an outbreak of hepatitis B among more than 300,000 U.S. Army and Allied troops. Nearly 50,000 clinical cases resulted from the contamination, including 29,000 incidents of overt jaundice. There had been medical evidence of postvaccination epidemics of hepatitis in both men and horses since 1885.
When journalist Peter Andrey Smith attended the 2017 World Happiness Summit in Miami, he asked everyone he met, “Who’s the happiest person here?” Many, he reported, pointed to themselves and said, “Me.”
A 2001 study in Science magazine found that matriarchal African elephants are essential to the well-being of elephant social groups because they possess social memories that enable them to recognize if outsiders are friendly to the herd. “Elephants can certainly build up a memory over the years and hold on to it,” said the study’s lead author.
In Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, published in 1843, Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “What philosophers say about actuality is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads on a sign in a secondhand shop: pressing done here. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, he would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale.”
When told by a doctor that he was dying in 1851, J.M.W. Turner replied, “Go downstairs, take a glass of sherry, and then look at me again.” The doctor followed the painter’s suggestion but returned with the same prognosis. The day Turner died he was wheeled to the window so that he could see the sunshine on the river and boats passing by.
Twenty-two-year-old critic Richard Goldstein savaged the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in a New York Times review when the album was released in 1967, calling it “busy, hip, and cluttered.” He later admitted the stereo he’d heard it on had a busted left speaker, but he remained unapologetic: “What can I say? If you’re not embarrassed by your youth, what good are you?”
A sect of violent Islamic agents founded in eleventh-century Persia to fight the Fatimid caliph in Egypt became known as the Hashshashin, which translates as “eaters of hashish”; their grand master supposedly administered the drug to demonstrate the paradise that would follow agents’ service. From the name Hashshashin, Christian Crusaders derived the word assassin.
“To bring rain or warm weather,” Micmac storyteller Pierrot Clemeau told an American ethnologist in 1897, “talk of whales or relate a legend describing the migration of the birds and the alternation of the seasons.”
Pianist and oil heir Roger Davidson brought his computer into a service shop in Mount Kisco, New York, in 2004, complaining of a virus. The owner, Vickram Bedi, confirmed there was a virus and claimed its source was a hard drive in Honduras, which he later explained was linked to an international conspiracy involving Opus Dei that threatened Davidson’s life. Over the course of six years, Bedi charged Davidson over $6 million for data retrieval and personal protection. Bedi was sentenced to jail in 2013.