On October 30, 1938, a CBS radio announcer presented the 8 p.m. broadcast: “Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.” After the 23-year-old Welles read an ominous introduction and the “music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra” played, bulletins followed with reports of Martians crash-landing in New Jersey. Many listeners thought that the Welles-Wells adaptation was news: some people crowded highways trying to flee from aliens; others pleaded with police for gas masks. Welles said at the broadcast’s end that it was only a “holiday offering” in anticipation of Halloween.
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Paul Biya has been president of Cameroon for forty-four years—the second-longest tenure for a nonroyal elected leader. Biya won his seventh term in 2018, with 71 percent of the vote. Since taking power in November 1982, he has placed his country 148th in the world in terms of economic output per capita and 163rd in the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings. The longest-serving leader is Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, president of Equatorial Guinea since 1979.
At the age of four, Robert Graves, having said his evening prayers, asked his mother if she would leave him any money when she died. “If you left me as much as five pounds, I could buy a bicycle,” he reasoned. “Surely you’d rather have me, Robby,” his mother said. “But I could ride to your grave on it,” he replied.
The world’s largest shipbreaking yard is near Alang, India, where, during the 2011–2012 season, around fifty thousand employees broke down 435 ships for scrap, which had a value of about $2 billion.
In 1891 Erik Weisz began using the stage name Harry Houdini—the first name deriving from his nickname “Ehrie” and the surname from the great French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, who himself had taken the surname from his wife, Josephe Cecile Eglantine Houdin, in order, he wrote, “to distinguish me from my numerous homonyms.”
Ahead of a visit from Hannah Arendt in 1971, Mary McCarthy purchased anchovy paste, which she knew Arendt enjoyed. When McCarthy pointed out where to find it in her cupboard, Arendt looked displeased. “She had a respect for privacy, separateness,” McCarthy later wrote. “I knew I had done something wrong in my efforts to please. She did not wish to be known, in that curiously finite and, as it were, reductive way. And I had done it to show her I knew her—a sign of love, though not always—thereby proving that in the last analysis I did not know her at all.”
“Have you been eating candy?” President John F. Kennedy asked his daughter Caroline before a dinner during the Cuban Missile Crisis. She did not reply. He inquired again and was ignored. “Caroline,” the commander in chief said, “answer me. Have you been eating candy—yes, no, or maybe?”
Home to an estimated eight hundred languages, the New York City borough of Queens has been called the “Noah’s ark of languages” by linguist Daniel Kaufman, an expert in endangered tongues. Most of the world’s last remaining speakers of Gottscheerish, a critically endangered Germanic dialect, live in the neighborhood of Ridgewood, while Vlashki, a dialect of Istro-Romanian, is believed to be more commonly spoken in Astoria than in Europe.
Herodotus wrote that whenever an important decision was to be made by Persian men, they discussed the matter when drunk. The next day, the consensus they reached was reexamined when sober. If it was still amenable, the motion passed; if it wasn’t, it was scrapped. “Conversely,” Herodotus continued, “any decision they make when they are sober is reconsidered afterward when they are drunk.”
When Booker T. Washington and Austrian ambassador Ladislaus Hengelmüller visited the White House on the same day in November 1905, Hengelmüller took Washington’s overcoat by mistake. According to the Washington Post, he noticed the mix-up on finding in the pocket “the left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit, killed in the dark of the moon,” which he “heroically relinquished.”
Before Sally Ride spent a week aboard the Challenger shuttle in 1983 and became the first American woman in space, NASA engineers asked her if she wanted a hundred tampons in her flight kit. “No,” she later recalled responding, “that would not be the right number.” They said they wanted to be safe. “Well,” she assured them, “you can cut that in half with no problem at all.”
In The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov fictionalized the well-known New Testament scene in which the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate offers the Jewish people the choice to save either the rebel Barabbas or Jesus Christ from execution. Bulgakov’s Yeshua declares that “all power is violence over people” and that “a time will come when there will be no power of the Caesars.” Pilate is deeply moved by the prisoner’s “mad utopian talk” and finds “no grounds for indictment”; when the crowd chooses to free Barabbas, Pilate feels “incomprehensible anguish” and an escalating migraine at being forced to sentence Yeshua to death.
A Spanish gallant in the sixteenth century who followed the contemporary fashion of padding his trunk-hose with quantities of bran was surprised to learn while entertaining ladies that a nail on his chair had opened a hole in his hose, and bran had started trickling out. The ladies laughed. He continued, encouraged, but bran soon was pouring forth. The ladies’ laughter increased. Finally, the gallant noticed the bran, bowed, and left in shame.
As a result of technological advances and shortages of enslaved workers, water power became used more widely in the Roman Empire around the late third century; the earliest known depiction of a water-powered stone sawmill was produced around this time in Hierapolis. Later, in 371, the poet Ausonius wrote an ode to the Moselle River: “He turns his millstones in furious revolutions and drives the shrieking saws through smooth blocks of marble.”
A 2011 study found that Chinese consumers are charged more due to “superstitious manipulations” of retail prices—fives and sixes appear more often than unlucky fours, eights and nines more than unlucky sevens. “Retailers,” the study reported, “are the clear winners.”