I ended up with enough equipment to bring full employment to a vale of sherpas—
I can never understand why Londoners fail to see that they live in the most wonderful city in the world. It is, if you ask me, far more beautiful and interesting than Paris and more lively than anywhe...
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.
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...
Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. They are, in short, a big part of us. From the bacteria’s point of view, of course, we are a rather...
Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.
Even worse was the fate of an eighteenth-century Château Margaux reputed to have once been owned by Thomas Jefferson and valued, very precisely, at $519,750. While showing off his acquisition at a New...
Electric jugs for all.
Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the international dateline.
Death duties in Harcourt’s time were a comparatively modest 8 percent on estates valued at £1 million or more, but they proved to be such a reliable source of revenue, and so popular with the millions...
Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a ma...
Bow was originally billed as the Brooklyn Bonfire, then as the Hottest Jazz Baby in Films, but in 1927 she became, and would forevermore remain, the It Girl. It was first a two-part article and then a...
Bobcats—admittedly much smaller creatures than mountain lions—are known to exist in considerable numbers and yet are so shy and furtive that you would never guess their existence. Many
Balchen happened to be at the wheel. This was breathtakingly disingenuous. In fact, Balchen had been flying for hours and very probably saved all their lives with his skillful landing. The
At depth, microbes shrink in size and become extremely sluggish. The liveliest of them may divide no more than once a century18, some no more than perhaps once in five hundred years. As The Economist...
As James Surowiecki noted in a New Yorker article, given a choice between developing antibiotics that people will take every day for two weeks and antidepressants that people will take every day for e...
As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time...
And it is all the more extraordinary when you reflect that despite perpetually modest funding Britain still has three of the world’s top ten universities and eleven of the top one hundred. Put another...