Some four hundred years after the death of Lucretius, Saint Jerome wrote the only existing biography of the philosopher, in two sentences, suggesting that Lucretius “was rendered insane by a love potion” and killed himself. In 1868 Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote in “Lucretius” that the philosopher’s wife “dreaming some rival, sought and found a witch / Who brewed the philter which had power, they said, / To lead an errant passion home again. / And this, at times, she mingled with his drink, / And this destroyed him.”
Archive
Miscellany
Roman physician Galen recounted a debate from which a medical rival “departed in a big hurry, knowing, I imagine, that if he remained he would be proved wrong.” Galen then wrote a book to be delivered to the rival’s followers. “You walked away,” it reads, “behaving like an athletic competitor who seizes the crown and flees before the contest; but today you will not escape refutation, for this book will follow you.”
After the pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, King Henry VIII separated the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s, initiating a series of property seizures that delivered coal-rich church lands in England to gentry who had it mined and sold to consumers in the cities. Over the next two centuries, the English coal-mining industry ballooned in scale; coal replaced wood as the country’s main energy source and fueled its rapid urbanization.
The ancient physician Galen catalogued the anxious delusions of his melancholic patients, including those of a man who “believes he has been turned into a kind of snail” and “runs away from everyone he meets lest his shell get crushed,” and those of another who “is afraid that Atlas, who supports the world, will become tired and throw it away, and he and all of us will be crushed and pushed together.”
“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.”
In January 1787 Catherine the Great embarked on a six-month survey of her empire, and Gregory Potemkin, former lover and governor general of Crimea, was among those in charge of the tour. Georg von Helbig, a critic of Potemkin, coined the term Potemkin villages to indict the governor general for falsifying his accomplishments, going so far as to claim that while Catherine sailed the Dnieper River, elaborate facades were set up, removed, and placed farther downriver so that she would see the same scenes five or six times.
Taiwanese regulators fined the Chang Guann Company in 2014 for selling 645 tons of so-called gutter oil—cooking oil illegally recycled from restaurant waste and animal by-products—and distributing it to more than 1,200 restaurants, schools, and food processors. The adulterated product showed up in instant noodles, cakes, dumplings, and canned pork.
At Uyun al-Hammam, an ancient graveyard discovered in northern Jordan, the remains of foxes were found buried alongside human remains, leading to speculation that humans may have kept red foxes as pets around sixteen thousand years ago, several millennia before animals were believed to have been domesticated. At one point, a human corpse had been disinterred and relocated. “Because the link between the fox and the human had been significant,” said one archaeologist studying the site, “the fox was moved as well.”
Of countries using the death penalty in 2012, the U.S. had the fifth-highest number of executions (43) after China (thousands), Iran (314), Iraq (129), and Saudi Arabia (79). Texas was the state with the most (15), bringing Governor Rick Perry’s total orders of execution up to 252. The figure is by far the highest of any U.S. governor and is trailed distantly by that of Perry’s predecessor, George W. Bush, who ordered 152—although Bush was in office for just shy of six years, as opposed to Perry’s twelve.
“Today is my eighteenth birthday!” Alexandrina Victoria wrote in her journal on May 24, 1837. Less than a month later, she was awoken at six o’clock and informed she was queen of the United Kingdom. “I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced,” she noted that day, “but I am sure that very few have more real goodwill and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.” Her reign, at 63 years and 216 days, is the second longest of the British monarchy.
“Pubic grooming has led to a severe depletion of crab-louse populations,” a medical entomologist with the company Insect Research & Development Ltd. said in an interview in January of this year. “Add to that other aspects of body-hair depilation, and you can see an environmental disaster in the making for this species.” More than 80 percent of college students in the U.S. remove all or part of their pubic hair.
Thirty to sixty million—the estimate of buffalo in the United States in the early 1800s. 1,200—the estimate some ninety years later.
During the fifth century, the body of a ten-year-old child was buried in the Umbrian town of Lugnano with a rock inside its mouth. The practice was part of a folk custom intended to prevent corpses from turning into vampires and infecting the living with malaria. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said the lead archaeologist who uncovered the skeleton in 2018.
Four years after the Romanovs were executed by Bolsheviks, a woman claiming to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia surfaced. She impressed skeptics with her ability to recall various details of the royal family’s life, and after Nicholas II’s cousin Grand Duke Alexander spent two days with her, he exclaimed, “I have seen Nicky’s daughter!” The woman spent decades fighting to be the legal heir to the Romanov fortune, losing her last suit in 1970. In the 1990s DNA evidence posthumously proved she was an imposter.
“A seaman in the coach told the story of an old sperm whale, which he called a white whale, which was known for many years by the whalemen as Old Tom, and who rushed upon the boats which attacked him, and crushed the boats to small chips in his jaws, the men generally escaping by jumping overboard and being picked up,” recorded Ralph Waldo Emerson in his journal on February 19, 1834, adding that the whale “was finally taken somewhere off Payta Head by the Winslow or the Essex.” It was the wreck of the Essex in 1820 from which Herman Melville drew inspiration for Moby Dick.