History's greatest lessons is that once the state embraces a religion, the nature of that religion changes radically. It loses its nonviolent component
Writing beautifully—calligraphy—was China’s first graphic art form. Although elsewhere in the world people drew first and learned to write later, in China, the reverse was true. First you learned to w...
When these early settlers hunted, they would leave red herring along their trail because the strong smell would confuse wolves, which is the origin of the expression red herring, meaning a false trail...
When sodium, an unstable metal that can suddenly burst into flame, reacts with a deadly poisonous gas known as chlorine, it becomes the staple food sodium chloride, NaCl, from the only family of rocks...
When my enemies seek my life, how can I do other than use my endeavor to destroy them in my own defense? The
When a peasant has a baby girl, the family puts up a vegetable every year and gives the jars to her when she’s married. This
Viking is a term—thought to have its root in the old Norse vika, meaning to go off—for Scandinavians who left their native land to seek wealth in commerce.
Venice manipulated markets by controlling production. In the late thirteenth century, wishing to raise the world market price, Venice had all saltworks in Crete destroyed and banned the local producti...
Unique to Sichuan, ma is the spicy flavor of a wild tree peppercorn called huajiao—with a taste between peppercorn, caraway, and clove, but so strong that too much will numb the mouth. Two varieties g...
Under English law the penalty for eating meat on Friday was hanging. The law remained on the books until the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII broke with the Vatican.
To eat surströmming, the bloated, bluish-white, little headless fish is slit in the belly and the roe removed. None but the brave eat the roe. The splayed fish is mashed hard on the spine with a fork...
Through these documents, many Japanese can trace their family as far back as 700. By
This is New York: skyscraper champion of the world where slickers and know-it-alls peddle gold bricks to each other and where the truth, crushed to earth, rises again more phony than a glass eye. —BEN...
There is a white vein with a very small amount of liquid in it: … Men try to catch the murex alive because it discharges its juice when it dies. They obtain the juice from the larger purple-fish by re...
That was when the Venetians made an important discovery. More money could be made buying and selling salt than producing it. Beginning in 1281, the government paid merchants a subsidy on salt landed i...
THE ROMANS SALTED their greens, believing this to counteract the natural bitterness, which is the origin of the word salad, salted.
Scientists estimate that between 1945 and 1958, the power of the nuclear weapons exploded in the world was equal to eight hundred times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. With each explosion, tiny parti...
Rich and poor live together in equality. The same food and similar houses are shared by all; wherefore they cannot envy each other’s hearths, and so they are free from the vices that rule the world. A...
Proteins unwind when exposed to heat, and they do the same when exposed to salt. So salting has an effect resembling cooking.
Philosophie du progrès, We are