It is beyond us to divine how any people could have bred cobs of corn from such a thin and unpropitious plant—or even thought to try. Hoping to settle the matter once and for all, food scientists from...
It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were al...
It is a fortunate fluke for us that HIV, the AIDS agent, isn’t among them – at least not yet. Any HIV the mosquito sucks up on its travels is dissolved by the mosquito’s own metabolism. When the day c...
Incorporated into many of the façades are parts of the original structure – stairways that go nowhere, columns supporting nothing, niches that once clearly held Roman busts. The effect is that the hou...
In one well-known case, a woman named Martha Robinson was for years beaten and physically misused by a cruel and unstable husband. Eventually, he infected her with gonorrhea and then poisoned her almo...
In fact, there is no point in trying to hide from your bacteria, for they are on and around you always, in numbers you can’t conceive. If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, y...
In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition - either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat...
In 1906 he and Hulda made the first of several trips to London to sift through the records.
If you count proper nouns, the word in English with the most varied spellings is air with a remarkable thirty-eight: Aire, ayr, heir, e’er, ere, and so on.
If there’s one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy—something we could all do with more of in our lives.
If all the ice sheets melted, sea levels would rise by 60 metres.
I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it.
I took a big draft of my beer, warmed by my reminiscences, and quietly delighted at the thought that my schooldays were forever behind me, that never again for as long as I lived would I have to bevel...
I left Los Angeles on 3 January and arrived in Sydney fourteen hours later on 5 January. For me there was no 4 January. None at all. Where it went exactly I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that for o...
I didn’t ask for twenty quarter-pound cheeseburgers, I asked for four quarter-pound cheeseburgers five times. Same thing, he said. It’s not the same thing at all. You can’t be this stupid. Two
Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured—never once at any of the billion points that could have erased us from history. We
Human memories are short and inaccurate.
Henry Ford had the additional distinction of being the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s memoir of 1925.
Good lord, look at you! he cried, delighted at my grubbiness. What have you been doing? You're filthy! He looked me up and down admiringly, then said in a more solemn tone: You haven't been screwing h...
From almost nothing, France in four years built up an aircraft industry that employed nearly 200,000 people and produced some 70,000 planes. Britain built 55,000 planes, Germany 48,000, and Italy 20,0...