Jefferson, incidentally, was also a great adventurer with foods. Among his many other accomplishments, he was the first person in America to slice potatoes lengthwise and fry them. So as well as being...
It’s interesting that Melburnians don’t tell jokes about Sydney. They tell jokes about their beloved footy. To wit: A man arriving for the Grand Final in Melbourne is surprised to find the seat beside...
It’s a strange thing because nobody can say exactly where the Scottish Highlands begin and end, but there comes a moment when the world fills with clean, sparkling air and the mountains take on a kind...
It would be hard to imagine two more improbable founders for a movement as ascetic as communism. While earnestly desiring the downfall of capitalism, Engels made himself rich and comfortable from all...
It was the most improbably wise move any aristocrat has ever made. Paxton leaped into the job with levels of energy and application that simply dazzled. He
It was history’s first co-operative international scientific venture, and almost everywhere it ran into problems. Many observers were waylaid by war, sickness or shipwreck. Others made their destinati...
It was full of lazy late-afternoon shadows and an impossible green lushness such as could only be appreciated by someone freshly arrived
It took Read some twenty years of searching to nail the matter down, but thanks to his efforts we now know that OK first appeared in print in the Boston Morning Post on 23 March 1839, as a jocular abb...
It seemed such an extraordinary notion—that I could set off from home and walk 1,800 miles through woods to Georgia, or turn the other way and clamber over the rough and stony White Mountains to the f...
It isn't easy being an organism. In the whole universe, as far as we yet know, there is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called the Earth, that will sustain you, and even it c...
It is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion. When two objects come together in the real world...
It is natural to suppose that global warming would act as a useful counterweight to the Earth’s tendency to plunge back into glacial conditions. However, as Kolbert has pointed out, when you are confr...
It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no around around it. There is...
It is mildly disconcerting to reflect that the whole of meaningful human history—the development of farming, the creation of towns, the rise of mathematics and writing and science and all the rest—has...
It is extraordinary to think that before he settled in London and became celebrated as a playwright, history provides just four recorded glimpses of Shakespeare—at his baptism, his wedding, and the tw...
It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of a...
It is an extraordinary fact but a true one that there are thousands of men in Britain who will never need Viagra as long as steam trains are in operation.
It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it. The
It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will forever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is.
Indeed, if not told to live -- if not given some kind of active instruction from another cell -- cells automatically kill themselves. Cells need a lot of reassurance.