I HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It’s where I’m from, after all. There’s baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don’t obse...
However, what America does possess in abundance is a legacy of colorful names. A mere sampling: Chocolate Bayou, Dime Box, Ding Dong, and Lick Skillet, Texas; Sweet Gum Head, Louisiana; Whynot, Missis...
How do migrating birds know which one to follow? What if the lead bird just wants to be alone?
Houses are really quite odd things. They have almost no universally defining qualities: they can be of practically any shape, incorporate virtually any material, be of almost any size. Yet wherever we...
His real gift was as a phrasemaker. Shakespeare’s language, says Stanley Wells, has a quality, difficult to define, of memorability that has caused many phrases to enter the common language. Among the...
Here are instructions for being a pigeon: (1) Walk around aimlessly for a while, pecking at cigarette butts and other inappropriate items. (2) Take fright at someone walking along the platform and fly...
He wrote authoritatively on magnetism, tides and the motions of the planets, and fondly on the effects of opium.
He was defiantly narrow-minded, barely educated, and at least close to functionally illiterate. His beliefs were powerful but consistently dubious, and made him seem, in the words of The New Yorker, m...
He had a curiously stunted sense of humor and loved practical jokes that veered dangerously close to cruelty. Once on a hot day he filled a friend’s water jug with kerosene and mirthfully stood by as...
He called it a mastodon (which means, a touch unexpectedly, nipple-teeth).
Goodness knows what the world is coming to when park rangers carry service revolvers.
Gibbs is perhaps the most brilliant person most people have never heard of. Modest to the point of near-invisibility, he passed virtually the whole of his life, apart from three years spent studying i...
Forty-two percent of all that was produced in the world was produced in the United States. America made 80 percent of the world’s movies and 85 percent of its cars.
Formerly there were two ways. One was to take the ferry. This is the way I came on my first visit, and I have to say it was strange. All the passengers – and there weren’t many – went below and lay do...
For you to be here now, trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you.
For us, the universe goes only as far as light has travelled in the billions of years since the universe was formed.
For reasons I couldn’t begin to guess at, a balustrade along the roofline had been adorned with life-sized statues of ordinary men, women and children. Goodness knows what this is meant to suggest – I...
Fired by the oxygen of irrationality, America entered a period of grave intolerance, not just toward immigrants but toward any kind of antiestablishment behavior. The Sedition Act of 1918 made it ille...
Eventually he made it to Buckingham Palace, where the king famously startled Lindbergh by asking him how he had peed during the flight. Lindbergh explained, a touch awkwardly, that he had brought alon...
Even so, as was his custom, he writes the name in an abbreviated form: Wllm Shaksp. It also has a large blot on the end of the surname, probably because of the comparatively low quality of the paper....