Intellect Plus

Topics

Ideas & Philosophy

1,874 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 10 of 32.

  1. The whale that sank the Essex gave Melville the ending of Moby-DickIn November 1820 a huge sperm whale charged the Nantucket whaler Essex twice and sent her to the bottom of the Pacific, some 2,000 nautical miles from South America. Twenty men to…
  2. Providence literally means seeing ahead, and theologians still argue how farThe word providence comes from Latin roots meaning to see ahead. In theology it names God's care for the world, but traditions split sharply over the details: does God steer every…
  3. Dylan Thomas squeezed a son's fury at death into nineteen strict linesDylan Thomas wrote his most famous poem in Florence in 1947, apparently for a father who would not die until late 1952. It is a villanelle, one of poetry's tightest forms, and its…
  4. A Sheffield-born Etonian became the American cop McNulty in The WireFew viewers of The Wire guessed that Baltimore detective Jimmy McNulty was played by an Old Etonian from Sheffield with a Trinity College Dublin degree. Dominic West's accent drew…
  5. How a Bronx parking attendant became the novelist of White NoiseDon DeLillo quit an advertising job in 1964 not to write, he said, but simply to stop working. He was living on sixty dollars a month in rent near the Queens–Midtown Tunnel, and i…
  6. Doris Lessing heard about her Nobel Prize while carrying in the groceriesWhen a journalist told Doris Lessing in 2007 that she had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, she swore mildly and kept unloading her shopping. She was then the oldest person ever …
  7. Rejected by 44 publishers, a fashion designer's first novel took the BookerDouglas Stuart drafted Shuggie Bain around twelve-hour days as a senior design director at Banana Republic. Thirty-two American publishers and twelve British ones said no. Grove A…
  8. Duke University began as a one-room subscription school with four other namesBefore it was Duke, it was Brown's Schoolhouse, then Union Institute Academy, then Normal College, then Trinity College. A tobacco fortune moved it to Durham in 1892, and a $40 mi…
  9. Stalingrad lost its name and Stalin lost his tomb in 1961Within a decade of his death, Joseph Stalin's body was carried out of Lenin's mausoleum, his name was cut from the Soviet anthem, and Stalingrad became Volgograd. The turning poin…
  10. As a Barnard freshman, Cynthia Nixon ran between two Broadway hits nightlyIn 1984 a teenage Cynthia Nixon played in two Mike Nichols productions at once, dashing the two blocks between theatres because both parts were short. Decades before Miranda in Se…
  11. Famine on a Greek island seeded a green mountain colony in eastern LibyaAround 631 BC settlers fleeing famine on Thera founded Cyrene on Libya's eastern bulge, giving the whole region its name. Cyrenaica is an unexpected slice of the Mediterranean: a …
  12. Lemony Snicket's creator saw his first novel rejected 37 timesBefore he became Lemony Snicket, narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events, Daniel Handler wrote a satirical novel about a teenage girl so dark that publishers turned it down 37 …
  13. Daniel Webster argued over 200 Supreme Court cases and never won the presidencyA farmer's son from New Hampshire who studied law mainly to escape his father's poverty, Daniel Webster became the most celebrated American orator of his age, delivering what many…
  14. Rossetti painted in oils with watercolour brushes and helped launch a rebellionDante Gabriel Rossetti, son of an Italian exile in London, co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 to overturn how English artists were trained. Poet as well as painter,…
  15. Branagh's Death on the Nile never went near Egypt and waited years for releaseKenneth Branagh's second Hercule Poirot mystery recreated a Nile steamer and the temples of Abu Simbel entirely in Surrey. Shot in 2019 and meant for cinemas that December, the fi…
  16. Dostoevsky's Demons was sparked by a real student murder in 1869 MoscowIn 1869 a radical cell led by Sergey Nechayev murdered one of its own members at a Moscow agricultural academy. Dostoevsky, who had once joined a revolutionary circle and paid for…
  17. When a navy loses a ship, a court-martial follows even without blameA court-martial is a military trial that judges members of the armed forces under military law. Yet it is not always an accusation: most navies automatically convene one whenever …
  18. Larry David titled his show to lower expectations, then it ran 25 yearsCurb Your Enthusiasm began as a one-off HBO special in 1999. Its title was partly a jab at people who fake enthusiasm to seem superior and partly a plea not to expect another Sein…
  19. A ten-day trip to Weimar Berlin gave Isherwood Sally Bowles and his life's subjectIn March 1929 Christopher Isherwood joined W. H. Auden in Berlin, drawn by the city's sexual freedom. The short visit changed everything. He moved there that November, filled diar…
  20. Why the word liberal means opposite things in America and EuropeSay liberal in the United States and most people hear centre-left, pro-welfare politics. Say it in Europe or Australia and it often means the reverse: free markets, low taxes and …
  21. A self-described C student from the Bronx rose to America's top soldierColin Powell, son of Jamaican immigrants, picked up Yiddish working in a Bronx baby furniture shop and admitted to a C average in geology at City College. He went on to chair the …
  22. Colitis is a description, not a diagnosis, and its causes vary widelyColitis simply means an inflamed colon. Doctors use the bare word when they do not yet know the cause, or when everyone in the room already does. Behind it sit very different illn…
  23. America's Communist Party fell to about 1,000 members, then grew againIn the late 1930s the Communist Party USA counted roughly 70,000 members and real clout in the labour movement. By 2000 one reference book reckoned it had about 1,000 and had all …
  24. Condé Nast was bought for $5 million as an anniversary presentIn 1959 the newspaper owner Samuel Newhouse bought Condé Nast for $5 million as a gift for his wife Mitzi, who adored Vogue. The publisher he acquired had started in 1909 with a s…
  25. Casablanca's Nazi villain was played by an actor who defied GoebbelsWhen Goebbels made German film workers declare their race in 1933, Conrad Veidt, who was not Jewish, wrote Jude to stand with his Jewish wife. It ended his German career. He fled …
  26. Tatlin's Tower was never built, yet it launched a whole art movementVladimir Tatlin's design for a Monument to the Third International, a spiralling machine of a building with searchlights and projection screens, ran out of money after the Russian…
  27. A seminarian who read Orwell to train himself became a Pulitzer-sharing war correspondentChris Hedges studied for the Presbyterian ministry at Harvard, then left for a year to learn Spanish in Bolivia and prepared for reporting by working through Orwell's collected wo…
  28. Christopher Hitchens left behind a one-line rule for dismissing unsupported claimsAnything asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. That compact principle, now called Hitchens's razor, is cited in philosophy and law. Its author was a Portsmo…
  29. Britain's Poet Laureate paid his bills writing detective novels as Nicholas BlakeCecil Day-Lewis was Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death, a former communist turned Oxford professor. He was also, under another name, the author of a long run of crime novels …
  30. A cenotaph is a tomb built on purpose to stay emptyThe word comes from Greek for empty tomb. A cenotaph honours people whose bodies lie elsewhere or were never found. Lutyens' plain stone Cenotaph in Whitehall, first built of wood…
  31. An earthquake in 1953 lifted the whole of Cephalonia 60 centimetresIn August 1953 a run of four earthquakes flattened almost every house on Cephalonia, the largest Ionian island. The strongest, magnitude 6.8, raised the entire island about 60 cen…
  32. Israel's first president was a chemist whose bacteria helped make British explosivesChaim Weizmann is remembered as a Zionist statesman and Israel's first president. He was also the father of industrial fermentation: a bacterium he harnessed in Manchester produce…
  33. Spain's last Habsburg king was sicker than most, but not as simple as legend saysCharles II inherited the Spanish throne as a small child in 1665 and spent his whole reign with Europe waiting for him to die. Generations of close-kin marriage had left him frail…
  34. A patronage machine insider, Chester Arthur surprised everyone by signing civil service reformChester A. Arthur rose as a loyal cog in Roscoe Conkling's New York political machine and was fired from a plum patronage job. After James Garfield's assassination made him presid…
  35. Chiron, the gentle centaur who taught Greece's greatest heroesMost centaurs in Greek myth were drunken brawlers. Chiron was the exception, hailed as the wisest and most just of his kind. Fostered by Apollo, he mastered medicine, music and pr…
  36. Catalans mark their national day on the anniversary of a defeat in 1714Every 11 September, Catalonia commemorates the day Barcelona surrendered to Bourbon forces, ending its status as a separate state within the Spanish crown. That choice says much a…
  37. Cavalier began as a Parliamentarian insult before royalists proudly adopted itIn June 1642, Parliament used the word Cavaliers to condemn the swaggering men around Charles I. The king's party turned the jibe into a badge of honour and answered by calling th…
  38. Camden's canal bridges still bear grooves cut by barge-towing ropesAlong the Regent's Canal in Camden Town, handrails near the bridges are scored with deep marks left by the ropes of horses that hauled barges until the 1950s. Ramps on the bank on…
  39. Michelangelo turned Rome's sacred hill to face St Peter's instead of the ForumFor centuries the Capitoline Hill looked down on the Roman Forum. When Pope Paul III asked Michelangelo in 1536 to redesign its square, he completed a reversal begun in medieval t…
  40. The same gas that poisons us is also made inside our bodies as a signalCarbon monoxide has no colour, no smell and at first no sting, which is why it is the most common kind of fatal poisoning in many countries. Yet our own cells produce small amount…
  41. Why four ancient virtues are called cardinal, after the Latin word for hingePrudence, justice, courage and temperance earned the label cardinal from cardo, Latin for hinge, because every other good quality was thought to swing on them. Plato sketched the …
  42. Carl Orff wrote Carmina Burana and also reshaped how children learn musicMost people know Carl Orff through one thunderous chorus. The Munich composer finished Carmina Burana in 1936 and felt it was the first time he had written exactly what he wanted.…
  43. Behind Princess Leia stood one of Hollywood's busiest and funniest script doctorsCarrie Fisher became famous at twenty as Princess Leia, but much of her working life happened on the page. She turned her own chaotic Hollywood upbringing into a bestselling first…
  44. Television arrived in a Fijian province, and within three years purging appeared among teenage girlsA survey in Nadroga, Fiji, found that no teenage schoolgirls reported purging in 1995, just weeks after television came to the province. By 1998 the figure was 11.3%. The finding …
  45. The Buraq, Muhammad's heavenly steed, is usually painted with wings it was never givenIn Islamic tradition the Buraq carried the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem and up through the seven heavens in a single night. The early texts never say it had wings like…
  46. The Byzantines never called their empire Byzantine; a German historian did in 1555For a thousand years the people of the eastern empire called their state the Empire of the Romans. The label Byzantium, taken from the old Greek city beneath Constantinople, was a…
  47. Italy got its name from the toe of the boot, CalabriaAncient Greek settlers called the native people of what is now Calabria the Italoi, supposedly after a legendary king, Italus. Over centuries the label spread up the peninsula unt…
  48. A Calcutta prayer meeting in 1828 helped spark the Bengal RenaissanceOn 20 August 1828, Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore gathered people of any caste, creed or gender in a Calcutta house to worship a single, nameless God. Their Brahmo Samaj…
  49. Brindisi's name means stag's head, after the shape of its harbourThe southern Italian port of Brindisi takes its name from a Messapian word for a stag's head, likely because its natural harbour branches like antlers. That harbour made it Rome's…
  50. A first-class degree went from rare to nearly one graduate in threeIn the early 1990s about one British graduate in 15 earned first-class honours. By 2017 the figure was 26%, and since 2019 it has approached 30%. The century-old grading system, d…
  51. A $6-a-week rented guitar started Bruce Springsteen's careerAfter watching Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show, seven-year-old Bruce Springsteen got a guitar his mother rented for $6 a week, then quit lessons when they did not pay off instantly.…
  52. The Bolshoi was co-founded by an English tightrope walkerRussia's grandest opera house began in 1776 when Catherine II licensed a prince to stage entertainments, and he teamed up with Michael Maddox, an English tightrope walker. Two of …
  53. Most scholars doubt the Exodus happened as the Bible tells itExodus gives Israel its founding story: slavery in Egypt, ten plagues, the parted sea and the covenant at Sinai. The scholar Carol Meyers calls it arguably the Bible's most import…
  54. Genesis tells creation twice, a clue to its many authorsRead Genesis closely and the world is created in two different accounts, Abraham twice sends Hagar into the desert, and a wife-sister story appears three times. Those repetitions …
  55. The Book of Isaiah was probably written by several prophetsThe book bears the name of an 8th-century BCE prophet from Judah, yet from chapter 40 onward Isaiah's name vanishes, the style shifts and the text speaks as if the Babylonian exil…
  56. Kings turns four centuries of royal history into a theological verdictThe Books of Kings trace Israel and Judah from King David's death to an exiled Judean king's release in Babylon, roughly 400 years. Their authors blended court annals with legends…
  57. Uncle Tom's Cabin was begun in a small Maine college townBowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, is tiny, yet its orbit includes Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a US president and the town where Harriet Beecher Stowe start…
  58. Bohumil Hrabal wrote a whole book as one sentence and told stories in a Prague pubOne of the great Czech writers of the 20th century spent years packing waste paper, labouring in a steelworks and moving scenery before his first book appeared, at 49. His novel C…
  59. Baron once meant simply the king's man, and its split created both houses of ParliamentBaron started out in Late Latin meaning a man, servant or soldier. After 1066 the Normans used it for anyone holding land directly from the king, and the way those men were summon…
  60. Dante's great muse may rest on a single line in a banker's willDante said he met his Beatrice only twice, nine years apart, yet she guides him to heaven in the Divine Comedy. The Florentine woman usually named as the real Beatrice, Bice Porti…

Open the feed