America has given us a pretty decent modern world and doesn’t always get enough thanks for that. But for reasons that genuinely escape me, it has also become spectacularly accommodating to stupidity....
According to Time Out magazine, at any given moment there are 600,000 people on the Underground, making it both a larger and more interesting place than Oslo.
Above all, the 1920s was a golden age for newspapers. Newspaper sales in the decade rose by about a fifth, to 36 million copies a day—or 1.4 newspapers for every household. New York City alone had twe...
A supernova occurs when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time more...
A filmmaker named Robert Goldstein was imprisoned for showing the British in a bad light in a movie about the American War of Independence.
22 million tonnes of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses.
There are three things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.
In breve, Shakespeare non è tanto una figura storica, quanto un'ossessione accademica. Una rapida occhiata agli indici delle molte riviste dedicate a lui e alla sua epoca disvela risolute indagini qua...
If one’s husband had been married before and widowed—a fairly common condition—and a close relative of his first wife’s died, the second wife was expected to engage in complementary mourning—a kind of...
Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.
He wrote authoritatively on magnetism, tides and the motions of the planets, and fondly on the effects of opium.
He called it a mastodon (which means, a touch unexpectedly, nipple-teeth).
At Wauchope there’s a Big Bull, he added. I raised my eyebrows in a way that said, Oh, yes? He nodded fondly. Its testicles swing in the breeze. It has testicles? I said, impressed. I’ll say. If they...
As a known entity, DNA has been around longer than you might think. It was discovered as far back as 1869 by Johann Friedrich Miescher, a Swiss scientist working at the University of Tübingen in Germa...
Among the tiny atomic structures the plankton take to the grave with them are two very stable isotopes—oxygen-16 and oxygen-18.
In breve, e come sempre, in Shakespeare un lettore attento può trovare sostegno per quasi qualsiasi posizione voglia prendere. (O come lo stesso Shakespeare ha scritto in una battuta citata spesso a s...
At some point in an unimaginably distant past some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to life. It absorbed some nutrients, gently pulsed, had a brief existence.