Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one-tenth had never been used before. Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original. It is a staggering display of ingenuity. But
Rich women, including the queen, made themselves additionally beauteous by bleaching their skin with compounds of borax, sulfur, and lead—all at least mildly toxic, sometimes very much more so—for pal...
Rat bites are almost certainly underreported because only the most serious cases attract attention, but even using the most conservative figures, at least fourteen thousand people in the United States...
Prohibition may be the greatest gift any government ever gave its citizens. A barrel of beer cost $4 to make and sold for $55. A case of spiritous liquor cost $20 to produce and earned $90--and all th...
Poor lighting, absence of handrails, confusing patterns on the treads, risers that are unusually high or low, treads that are unusually wide or narrow, and landings that interrupt the rhythm of ascent...
Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
Our carelessness is all the more alarming since the discovery that many other ailments may be bacterial in origin. The process of discovery began in 1983 when Barry Marshall, a doctor in Perth, Wester...
Originally, geological history was divided into four spans of time: primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary.
On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, and in a single s...
On average the total walking of an American these days--that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls--adds up to 1.4 miles a week, bar...
On 1 July 1858, Darwin’s and Wallace’s theory was unveiled to the world. Darwin himself was not present. On the day of the meeting, he and his wife were burying their son.
Now here’s a thought to consider. Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for...
Most people think they want Main Streets but won't make the small sacrifices in terms of time, cost, and footpower necessary to sustain them. The sad fact is that we have created a culture in which mo...
Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Jim Crace, Arthur C. Clarke, Russell Hoban, Anna Kavan, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Walter M. Miller, Tim O’Brien, Will Self and Marcel Theroux,
Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail, and the most unreliable water sources, particularly...
Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.
Lagniappe, usually attributed to the French of New Orleans, in fact originated among the Kechuan Indians of Peru as yapa. The Spanish adopted it as ñapa. The French then took it from the Spanish and w...
Just beyond the edge of our property in 1985 a farmer crossing a field found a rare, impossible-to-misconstrue Roman phallic pendant. To me this was, and remains, an amazement: the idea of a man in a...
John was prosecuted (or threatened with prosecution—the records are sometimes a touch unclear) for trading in wool and for money-lending, both highly illegal activities.
John A. Templer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of the definitive (and, it must be said, almost only) scholarly text on the subject, The Staircase: Studies of Hazards, Falls, and...