So why, you are bound to ask at some point in your life, do microbes so often want to hurt us? What possible satisfaction could there be to a microbe in having us grow feverish or chilled, or disfigur...
So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.
So I thought it might be interesting, for the length of a book, to consider the ordinary things in life, to notice them for once and treat them as if they were important, too. Looking around my house,...
Science is about making stuff, just as much as it is about understanding stuff.
Robert G. Elliott was not a murderous person by nature, but he proved, no doubt to his own surprise, to be rather good at killing people.
Pennsylvania one year paid out $90,000 in bounties for the killing of 130,000 owls and hawks to save the state’s farmers a slightly less than whopping $1,875 in estimated livestock losses. (It is not...
Our word salary comes literally from the vulgar Latin salarium, salt money—the Roman soldier’s ironic term for what it would buy.
Once there were many more in like vein—e.g., tuifu (the ultimate in fuckups), tarfu (things are really fucked up), fubar (fucked up beyond all recognition), and fubid (fuck you, buddy, I’m detached).
On another occasion, he stared at the Sun for as long as he could bear, to determine what effect it would have upon his vision.
ONE OF THE THINGS that happens when you get older is that you discover lots of new ways to hurt yourself. Recently, in France, I was hit square on the head by an automatic parking barrier, something I...
Norfolk specializes in odd pronunciations. Hautbois is hobbiss, Wymondham is windum, Costessey is cozzy, Postwick is pozzik. People often ask why that is. I’m not sure, but I think it is just somethin...
My father once owned a McGregor Glen Plaid Visa-Versa Reversible Jacket and got real pleasure from showing people, including total strangers, how you could turn it inside out and have a second, bonus...
Mrs. Lindbergh declined all pleas to kiss or embrace her son, explaining that they came from an undemonstrative Nordic race, which in her case was wholly untrue.
Medieval banquets show people eating all kinds of foods that are no longer eaten. Birds especially featured. Eagles, herons, peacocks, sparrows, larks, finches, swans, and almost all other feathered c...
Looked at from above, west London isn’t so much a city as a forest with buildings.
Less than a decade after the Great Exhibition, iron as a structural material was finished—which makes it slightly odd that the most iconic structure of the entire century, about to rise over Paris, wa...
Just to ease you into a sense of perspective here, Australia is the least wooded continent (Antarctica excluded, of course) and yet it is also the world’s largest exporter of woodchips
Jennings quotes the response of a contestant in the Miss Teen USA competition when asked to explain why so many Americans couldn’t even find their own country on a map. With solemnity and conviction s...
It would be hard to believe that the continuous movement of tectonic plates has no effect on the development of life on earth.
It was always Christmas at my grandparents’ house, or Thanksgiving, or the Fourth of July, or somebody’s birthday. There was always happiness there.