Japanese imperial history relates that Prince Shotoku “in person prepared for the first time laws” with a constitution in 604. “All men are influenced by class feelings, and there are few who are intelligent,” he declared, lamenting bribe-taking judges with whom lawsuits by rich men are always effective—“like the stone flung into water”—while the “plaints of the poor” never get anywhere, as “water cast upon a stone.”
Archive
Miscellany
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow attended Bowdoin College—both class of 1825—at the same time as Franklin Pierce, who was a year ahead of them. The fourteenth president of the United States was at Hawthorne’s side when the author died in 1864. Longfellow served as a pallbearer at the funeral.
The first-century Roman writer Gaius Julius Hyginus relates the story of Agnodice, a young Athenian woman who traveled to Alexandria to study medicine. On her return to Athens she disguised herself as a man in order to practice, and was brought before the court of the Areopagus. “You men are not spouses but enemies,” Agnodice’s patients protested, “since you are condemning the woman who discovered health for us.” Around 500 bc, the law forbidding women to study medicine was repealed.
Samuel Johnson enlisted Tobias Smollett, author of Roderick Random, to help rescue Johnson’s “Negro servant Francis Barber” from naval service—“a state of life,” as James Boswell wrote, “of which Johnson always expressed the utmost abhorrence.” Johnson once said, “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.” At another time he claimed, “A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”
According to a study published in the American Sociological Review, from 1985 to 2004 the mean number of “close confidants” (people with whom one can discuss important matters) Americans had dropped by nearly a third, from 2.94 to 2.08 people. Similarly, the number of those who said they could not discuss important matters with anyone more than doubled, to nearly 25 percent. “The general image,” the researchers wrote, “is one of an already densely connected, close, homogeneous set of ties slowly closing in on itself.”
“My music is best understood by animals and children,” Igor Stravinsky said in 1961. Over two millennia earlier, Aristotle had counseled in The Politics that young men ought to attain a musical sophistication with “a capacity for enjoying noble melodies and rhythms and not merely that general effect of music which is enjoyed by some of the lower animals, as well as by a number of slaves and children.”
Members inducted into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2010 included Yvonne Brill, whose electrothermal hydrazine thruster keeps satellites in space orbit, as well as Arthur Fry and Steven Silver, who created sticky notes (Fry, the concept; Silver, the glue). “Note: It took one woman to invent a rocket thruster,” wrote a Washington Post reporter about the induction ceremony, “and two men to invent Post-its.”
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.
“The history of the twentieth century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire,” reads the Statement of Principles for the Project for the New American Century, June 3, 1997. Among the signatories were Dick Cheney, Francis Fukuyama, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Jeb Bush—but not George W.
After “a certain knight shamefully divulged the intimacies and the secrets” of his lover, André Le Chapelain wrote in his late twelfth-century The Art of Courtly Love, an ad hoc tribunal of noble Gascon women “decided unanimously that forever after he should be deprived of all hope of love, and that in every court of ladies or of knights he should be an object of contempt and abuse to all.”
Joseph Smith and other Mormon church leaders drew up articles for the Kirtland Safety Society Bank to provide capital to the burgeoning economy of Kirtland, Ohio, in 1836. Unable to obtain a bank charter, they printed banknotes as the Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company. The notes were used as tender. The bank failed during the Panic of 1837; holders of the notes were unable to recover their face value, and Smith then fled to Missouri to avoid arrest.
The critic Vladimir Stassov recalled that when the composers Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Modest Mussorgsky “were still young men living together in one room…The piano could be heard, and the singing would start, and with great excitement and bustle they would show me what they had composed the previous day, or the day before or the day before that—how wonderful it was."
George Romero, who pioneered the modern zombie film in 1968, complained in 2010 that he’d “never had a zombie eat a brain, but it’s become this landmark thing.” The trope was introduced in 1985 by Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead, in which a zombie woman explains that eating brains relieves the “pain of being dead.” Some fans have speculated this is due to the brain’s high levels of serotonin.
In 1639 Puritan settlers in Massachusetts authorized the expulsion of “pauper aliens” in what is thought to be the first case of deportation in the country. Soon after, Virginia and Pennsylvania passed laws heavily restricting “the importation of paupers,” which included criminals and “foreigners and Irish servants.”
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.”