When the Earth was only about a third of its eventual size, it was probably already beginning to form an atmosphere, mostly of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane and sulphur. Hardly the sort of stuff t...
When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke's commode. The main hall was m...
When simple plants colonized the land and the first creatures crawled gasping from the sea, the Appalachians were there to greet them.
When each precedes the noun or pronoun to which it refers, the verb should be singular: ‘Each of us was …’. When it follows the noun or pronoun, the verb should be plural: ‘We each were …’. Each not o...
When at last a cab arrived and pulled up directly in front of me, I was astonished to discover that seventeen grown men and women believed they had a perfect right to try to get in ahead of me. A midd...
When at last Lindbergh reached the speaking platform, he nodded to those present and accepted the cheers of the crowd. President Coolidge made a short speech of welcome, pinned the Distinguished Flyin...
Whatever the actual total, 99.99 per cent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.
What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper strea...
What if we are all getting stupid at more or less the same rate and we don’t realize it because we are all declining together? You might argue that we’d see a general fall in IQ scores, but what if it...
We’re going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the cost of all else. Great economic success doesn’t produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we’...
We live in a world that has practically no appreciation for quality, tradition, or classiness, and in which people who can’t spell even common words get to decide what survives. That
We have been spoiled by artists’ renderings into imagining a clarity of resolution that doesn’t exist in actual astronomy. Pluto in Christy’s photograph is faint and fuzzy—a piece of cosmic lint—and i...
We don’t know if he ever left England. We don’t know who his principal companions were or how he amused himself. His sexuality is an irreconcilable mystery. On only a handful of days in his life can w...
We are the only creature that can harm at a distance.
Was Hamlet a Man or a Woman? and others of similarly inventive cast.
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...
Until 1604 the age of consent was twelve for a girl, fourteen for a boy.
To build the most basic yeast cell, for example, you would have to miniaturize about the same number of components as are found in a Boeing 777 jetliner and fit them into a sphere just five microns ac...
To avoid arousal more generally, women were instructed to get plenty of fresh air, avoid stimulating pastimes like reading and card games, and above all never to use their brains more than was strictl...
This is comfortable and clean and familiar. Apart from a tendency among men of a certain age to wear knee-high socks with shorts, these people are just like you and me.