There are really only two ways to get hit on the head by a parking barrier. One is to stand underneath a raised barrier and purposely allow it to fall on you. That is the easy way, obviously. The othe...
There’s something satisfying, I think,’ Evans said, ‘about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right...
These actions have arcane names like braking, retting, swingling (or scutching), and hackling or heckling, but essentially they involve pounding, stripping, soaking, and otherwise separating the plian...
These neighborhoods went on for miles—just street after foot-wearying street of trophy homes, with big gates beside broad drives, patios adorned with Grecian urns on ornate plinths, and garages for fl...
They explained to me that this is simply an affliction of age. The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people.
This is a disease for the person who wants to experience it all.
This is a point known to geology as the KT boundary1 and it marks the time, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs and roughly half the world’s other species of animals abruptly vanish from the foss...
Though you tell yourself it’s preposterous, you can’t quite shake the feeling that you are being watched. You order yourself to be serene (it’s just a woods for goodness sake), but really you are jump...
To a British crossword enthusiast, the clue An important city in Czechoslovakia instantly suggests Oslo. Why? Look at Czech(OSLO)vakia again. A seed you put in the garage is caraway, while HIJKLMNO is...
To get from protoplasmal primordial atomic globule (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner fo...
Traveling is more fun-- hell, life is more fun--if you can treat it as a series of impulses.
Trinil skullcap.
Until 1604 the age of consent was twelve for a girl, fourteen for a boy.
Vesto Slipher, of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, was the first person to notice that distant galaxies appeared to be moving away from us—evidence that the universe was not, as everyone had long as...
Vince was notorious. He would easily have been the world’s most terrifying human had he but been human. I don’t know quite what he was, other than it was five feet six inches of wiry malevolence in a...
Walpole invented a term, gloomth, to convey the ambience of Gothick; Wyatt’s houses were the very quintessence of gloomth.
Was Hamlet a Man or a Woman? and others of similarly inventive cast.
We are not only what we do, we are also what we imagine.
We are so used to having a lot of comfort in our lives—to being clean, warm, and well fed—that we forget how recent most of that is. In fact, achieving these things took forever, and then they mostly...
We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life's dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes. The on...
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