The little town of Dayton - not far from where Katz and I now sat, as it happened - was the scene of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when the state prosecuted a schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes...
Nobody deserves to go to the World Series more than the Chicago Cubs. But they can't go because that would spoil their custom of never going. It is an irreconcilable paradox.
Incidentally, the long-held idea that spices were used to mask rotting food doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. The only people who could afford most spices were the ones least likely to have bad meat,...
The author reveals a cultural change that took place when clergy were paid based on a tax on the land's value rather than what it produced. This meant that, while parishioners could suffer through a t...
Because they are so long-lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We...
It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectly comfortable, and instead covered their heads with something foreign and uncomfortable. Very often...
Das Fazit aus alledem lautet: Wir leben in einem Universum, dessen Alter wir nicht berechnen können, umgeben von Sternen, deren Entfernung wir nicht kennen, zwischen Materie, die wir nicht identifizie...
An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just...
You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It's just a fact of life.
So, if people didn’t settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea – or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don’t know if any of them...
It was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous.
It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and too...
Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you...
Describing his experience with the sting of an extremely toxic jellyfish, he did something you don't often see a scientist do: he shivered.
The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.
In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-hee...
Cavendish is a book in himself. Born into a life of sumptuous privilege- his grandfathers were dukes, respectively, of Devonshire and Kent- he was the most gifted English scientist of his age, but als...
And now here I was in McDonald's again for the first time since my earlier fracas. I vowed to behave myself, but McDonald's is just too much for me. I ordered a chicken sandwich and a Diet Coke.'Do yo...
I love to watch cities wake up, and Paris wakes up more abruptly, more startlingly, than any place I know.
I suppose because I grew up a thousand miles from the sea and missed the great age of passenger liners, I have always been subject to a romantic longing for ocean travel.