To gibbet is to dip a corpse in tar and suspend it in a flat iron cage (the gibbet) in plain view of townsfolk while it rots and gets pecked apart by crows. A stroll through the square must have been...
To Huang Ti’s credit, though, he managed, without ever disassembling a corpse, to figure out that the blood of the body is under the control of the heart and that the blood current flows in a continuo...
There, just beyond his open palm, was our mother’s face. I wasn’t expecting it. We hadn’t requested a viewing, and the memorial service was closed-coffin. We got it anyway. They’d shampooed and waved...
The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new h...
The pay worked out to about $1,000 a year—some five to ten times the earnings of the average unskilled laborer—with summers off. The job was immoral, and ugly to be sure, but probably less unpleasant...
Taste—as in personal preference, discernment—is subjective. It’s ephemeral, shaped by trends and fads. It’s one part mouth and nose, two parts ego. Even flavors that professional evaluators agree are...
Stocks passed my e-mail along to Model Gut senior scientist Richard Faulks. Faulks was dismissive not only of extreme chewing, but also of the related fad for blenderizing to increase the accessibilit...
Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. In a
Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. In a culture of conformity, that’s braver than it sounds.
People pooh-pooh Bud. It’s an extremely well-made beer. It’s clean, it’s refreshing. If you’re mowing the lawn and you come in and you want something refreshing and thirst-quenching, you wouldn’t drin...
Olive trees grow in the same climate and soil conditions as grapes. The olive oil people have been up in Napa Valley all along, going, Hey, how do we get a piece of this action?
My interpreter Sayuri is folding a piece of notebook paper. She is at step 21, where the crane's body is inflated. The directions show a tiny puff besides an arrow pointing at the bird. It makes sense...
In Working Ethics: William Beaumont, Alexis St. Martin, and Medical Research in Antebellum America, historian Alexa Green explains the men’s relationship as clearly one of master and servant. If the m...
If you try this yourself, I recommend doing so when no one is home. Otherwise, you will run the risk of someone walking in on you and having to witness a scene that includes a mirror, the husband’s St...
If there were ever a cadaver eligible for sainthood, it would not be our Spalding Gray upon the cross, it would be these guys: the brain-dead, beating-heart organ donors that come and go in our hospit...
I am of the opinion that the vulva of Your Most Sacred Majesty should be titillated for some length of time before intercourse.
For the forces of any given blast, one type may stretch, say, a fifth of its length without tearing, while another may manage just 5 percent. WIAMan will be calibrated to reflect these differences and...
Edison believed that living beings were animated and controlled by life units, smaller-than-microscopic entities that inhabited each and every cell and, upon death, evacuated the premises, floated aro...
During World War II, when combat rations were tinned, meat hashes were a common entrée because they worked well with the filling machines. But the men wanted something they could chew, something into...
Borman's dumping urine. Urine [in] approximately one minute. Two lines further along, we see Lovell saying, What a sight to behold!