Intellect Plus
Society
1,092 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 10 of 19.
- Some violence is slow, quiet and built into how societies workMost people picture violence as a sudden blow. Researchers also describe slow violence, gradual harm through pollution and degradation that may go unnoticed for years, and structu…
- Europe's first universities were guilds nobody officially authorisedNo king or pope founded the earliest European universities. According to the historian Hastings Rashdall, they formed on their own as guilds of teachers or students, part of an ur…
- Warm water from power plants counts as pollution tooWater pollution is not only oil slicks and chemical sludge. Power stations and factories that use rivers as coolant return the water warmer, and that heat alone can upset aquatic …
- The humanities began as a Renaissance alternative to studying divinityIn Renaissance universities, studying the humanities meant reading classical Latin and Greek authors instead of theology. The scholars who championed this course became known as h…
- One fair coin flip holds exactly one bit of informationToss a fair coin and learning the result gives you precisely one bit, the amount of information that halves your uncertainty. Two tosses give two bits. That simple idea turns some…
- Social networks were being mapped decades before anyone logged onLong before online platforms borrowed the phrase, sociologists were drawing social networks by hand. In the 1930s the psychiatrist Jacob Moreno sketched classroom and workplace re…
- Norms work because everyone expects everyone else to follow themMost of the rules that shape daily life were never written down or voted on. Nobody decreed them, yet people follow them, largely because they expect others to do the same and to …
- Why societies hold together at all is a surprisingly hard questionMillions of strangers mostly cooperate, queue, trade and follow rules without constant force. Explaining why is known as the problem of order, and it sits at the heart of sociolog…
- Why sociologists borrowed a geologist's word for layers of rockThe term stratification comes from the Latin stratum, a flat layer, as in rock. Sociologists use it for the way societies sort people into ranked tiers by wealth, occupation, educ…
- Social work grew out of the slums of industrial EnglandAs factories drew crowds into Victorian cities, mass urban poverty overwhelmed older forms of charity. In London the Charity Organization Society began visiting families one by on…
- The word social comes from Rome's rebellious alliesSocial traces back to the Latin socii, allies, and in particular to the Italian states allied with the Roman Republic. The irony is that those allies rose against Rome in what bec…
- Solidarity began as a legal term for shared debtBefore it became a rallying cry, solidarity was a dry piece of legal jargon. In French law it described debtors who were jointly liable to one creditor, each answerable for the wh…
- Your pupils give you away, and you cannot stop themYou can rehearse your words and even fake a convincing smile, but your pupils are beyond your control. They widen on their own when something or someone interests you. Much of the…
- A boss giving orders is not having a conversationNobody has a watertight definition of conversation, so it is often described by what it excludes. Swapping ritual greetings does not count. Neither does a boss issuing instruction…
- Everyone uses the word safety, yet nobody agrees on what it meansSafety turns up in laws, standards, manuals and theses, usually on the assumption that its meaning is obvious. It is not. There is no universally accepted definition, and many off…
- The famous 7-38-55 rule of communication applies far less often than claimedA popular claim holds that words carry just 7 percent of a message, tone 38 percent and facial expression 55 percent. It traces to Albert Mehrabian's research in the 1960s, but it…
- Most languages mark yes-no questions with a particle, not by reordering wordsEnglish turns a statement into a question by flipping words around, often recruiting do: Sam reads becomes Does Sam read? That makes English unusual. Across the world, the commone…
- Ceylon's first prime minister started out running a graphite mineD. S. Senanayake was a mediocre student and keen cricketer who managed his family's graphite mine and rubber estates. Jailed without charge for 46 days by British authorities in 1…
- The Athenian lawgiver behind the word draconian may have been a sacred snakeStealing a cabbage could supposedly cost you your life under Draco's code, which is why harsh rules have been called draconian since the 18th century. Yet almost nothing is known …
- A Soviet anti-corruption crusader became the face of Gorbachev's foreign policyEduard Shevardnadze built his career by jailing corrupt party bosses in Soviet Georgia, turned the republic into a rare economic bright spot in the stagnant 1970s, and then became…
- At seventeen, Edward III seized power from his mother's lover in a night raidCrowned at fourteen after his mother and her lover Roger Mortimer forced his father off the throne, Edward III spent three years as a figurehead. In October 1330 he and a handful …
- Mirabeau named social science in 1767, long before it had departmentsWhen Mirabeau put the words social science into print in 1767, the idea of studying society the way physicists study nature was still new. Auguste Comte later went further and cal…
- Demosthenes shaved half his head so he could not skip speech practicePlutarch tells of a young Athenian who dug an underground study, shaved half his head so he would be too embarrassed to go out, and practised talking with pebbles in his mouth. Th…
- Diocletian quit being emperor to grow vegetables, and his palace became a cityOn 1 May 305, weakened by illness, Diocletian did something no Roman emperor had done before: he stepped down of his own accord. He retired to a vast palace on the Dalmatian coast…
- Domitian, touchy about his baldness, reportedly wrote a book on hair careAccording to the biographer Suetonius, the emperor Domitian was so sensitive about going bald that he wore wigs and even wrote a book about looking after hair. Suetonius also pain…
- Cnut ruled three kingdoms, yet nobody knows who his mother wasCnut the Great became king of England in 1016, of Denmark in 1018 and of Norway in 1028, a realm historians call the North Sea Empire. Yet his birth date is a guess somewhere betw…
- Proclaimed emperor in York, Constantine needed interpreters at his own church councilsConstantine, the emperor who steered Christianity into the Roman mainstream, was acclaimed by his troops not in Rome but at Eboracum, today's York, in 306. He spoke Latin, so when…
- Corazon Aquino gave her first political speech at 45 and became president at 53For most of her husband's career, Corazon Aquino stood at the back of his rallies rather than on stage, and she quietly sold part of her inheritance to fund his campaigns. She mad…
- Florence exiled Cosimo de' Medici, and then its money followed him outIn 1433 Florence's rulers jailed Cosimo de' Medici and then banished him; some rivals wanted him executed. He moved to Venice and took his bank with him. So much capital drained o…
- Dag Hammarskjöld thought his UN nomination was an April Fool's jokeJust after midnight on 1 April 1953, a journalist phoned Dag Hammarskjöld to say the Security Council had picked him to lead the United Nations. Nobody had told him he was a candi…
- Daniel of Galicia drank the khan's mare's milk and was handed wineSummoned in 1246 to the Golden Horde's capital on the Volga, Prince Daniel of Galicia was asked by Batu Khan whether he drank fermented mare's milk like the Mongols. Until now no,…
- Herodotus claimed Darius won the Persian throne with a groom's horse trickAccording to Herodotus, six Persian nobles agreed that whoever's horse neighed first at sunrise would be king. Darius's groom Oebares made sure his master's stallion caught the sc…
- A locked cemetery gate launched the only solicitor ever to be prime ministerA Welsh vicar locked his churchyard to keep out a Baptist funeral. A young solicitor, David Lloyd George, advised the mourners to break the gate open. The case went all the way to…
- Rome once paid the Dacian king Decebalus to keep the peaceAfter Decebalus's Dacians defeated a Roman army in the mountain pass of Tapae, Emperor Domitian, stretched by wars elsewhere, agreed to pay him eight million sesterces a year and …
- How a salt merchant's son became known by a Cantonese nicknameThe name the world knows, Chiang Kai-shek, is a Cantonese pronunciation of Jieshi, meaning firm as a rock, a pen name he adopted in 1912 from the I Ching. From early 1918 people u…
- Sweden's Christina was officially crowned king, then gave the crown awayAlthough everyone called her queen, the title the Swedish parliament gave Christina at her coronation in February 1633 was king. She was six. Twenty-one years later she abdicated,…
- An eclipse trip made Chulalongkorn king of Siam at fifteenIn August 1868 King Mongkut of Siam travelled south of Hua Hin with his son to watch a solar eclipse he had predicted, and his forecast beat those of some French astronomers. Both…
- The schoolboy who mocked striking cabbies went on to build Britain's welfare stateIn 1899 a teenage Clement Attlee wrote in his school magazine that striking London cab drivers would soon be begging for fares. At Oxford he called himself an old-fashioned imperi…
- Every French King Louis was, in a sense, named after ClovisThe Frankish name of Clovis, reconstructed as Hlodowig, passed through Latin Hludovicus to become Louis, the name of 18 kings of France, as well as German Ludwig, Dutch Lodewijk a…
- Charles IV rebuilt Prague on the model of Paris and gave it a universityBorn Wenceslaus in Prague in 1316, the future Emperor Charles IV spent seven boyhood years at the French court and took his new name from his great-uncle, the king of France. Back…
- Charles Martel escaped prison and ended up choosing the Frankish kingsWhen Pepin of Herstal died in 714, his widow locked his son Charles in a cell in Cologne to keep him from the succession. Within a few years Charles had broken out, beaten every r…
- Charles the Fat reunited Charlemagne's empire, then watched it fall apartA youngest son with no obvious path to power, Charles the Fat had three kingdoms drop into his lap, and by 884 he ruled everything his great-grandfather Charlemagne had held. Thre…
- How a string of deaths handed Charles V an empire spanning oceansWhen Charles was born in Ghent in 1500, he stood to inherit only the Low Countries. Then Spanish heirs kept dying. By 1519 he held Spain, Naples, Sicily, Austria, the Netherlands …
- Charles XII, the teenage king who refused every chance at peaceIn 1700 three neighbouring powers attacked Sweden, betting that its 18-year-old king would crumble. Instead Charles XII knocked Denmark out of the war within months and routed a R…
- Cato the Elder ended speeches demanding Carthage be destroyedLate in life, the Roman statesman Cato the Elder reportedly closed speeches with the same blunt line: Carthage must be destroyed. The stern farmer-soldier also wrote the oldest su…
- Sent abroad for his health, Cecil Rhodes came to control the world's diamondsIn 1870 a sickly 16-year-old vicar's son was shipped to South Africa in the hope that sea air and sunshine might spare him tuberculosis. Within two decades Cecil Rhodes controlled…
- Cesare Borgia, the pope's son who inspired Machiavelli's The PrinceAt 18, Cesare Borgia was a cardinal of the Church, appointed the moment his father became Pope Alexander VI. Within five years he had resigned, taken a French dukedom and begun co…
- Chanakya, India's legendary kingmaker, may never have written his famous bookTradition credits Chanakya, the Brahmin adviser who helped Chandragupta Maurya found an empire, with writing the Arthashastra, a classic manual of statecraft. Scholars now think t…
- Chandragupta Maurya built an empire yet left almost no trace of himselfChandragupta Maurya founded the first great empire of the Indian subcontinent around 320 BCE, yet nothing reliable survives about his birth, family or youth. Historians piece his …
- Charlemagne's name became the Slavic word for kingThe Frankish ruler Charlemagne left such a mark that his Latin name, Karolus, probably became the word for king in Slavic languages: korol in Russian, król in Polish. Yet the Fath…
- At fifteen, Charles de Gaulle imagined himself as General de GaulleAs a teenager, Charles de Gaulle wrote an essay picturing a certain General de Gaulle leading France to victory over Germany in 1930. Cadets later nicknamed the lanky youth the gr…
- Charles I, the sickly second son who lost his crown and headCharles I was so frail as a toddler that he was left behind in Scotland when his family moved to England in 1603, and he wore boots of Spanish leather and brass to strengthen weak…
- Cardinal Mazarin, the gambler who galloped between armies shouting peaceOn 26 October 1630, French and Spanish troops faced each other outside Casale in northern Italy, ready to fight. A young papal envoy rode between the lines waving a flag and cryin…
- Richelieu became a bishop only because his brother chose the monasteryArmand du Plessis trained as a young officer, learning fencing, riding and drill. Then his family's claim on the rich bishopric of Luçon needed a clergyman, and his older brother …
- Finland's national hero began as a Russian imperial cavalry officerBefore he became the father of modern Finland, Gustaf Mannerheim spent three decades in the Russian imperial army, took part in the 1896 coronation of Tsar Nicholas II and rose to…
- Casimir the Great found Poland built of wood and left it stonePolish schoolchildren still recite a rhyme about Casimir III: he inherited a country of wooden towns and left it walled in brick and stone. During his reign from 1333 to 1370, nea…
- Orphaned at one month, Catherine de' Medici ended up steering France for three kingsWithin weeks of Catherine de' Medici's birth in Florence in 1519, both her parents were dead. She grew up a political pawn, held hostage in convents during a revolt, then married …
- A penniless German princess studied Russian by night and became Catherine the GreatSophie of Anhalt-Zerbst arrived in Russia in 1744 aged 15, a princess from a family with little money, betrothed to a cousin she had found detestable at first sight. She rose late…
- A marriage refused with an insult sparked the first Turkic empireAround 550 the Turkic chieftain Bumin asked his overlord, the Rouran khagan Anagui, for a princess as a wife. Anagui refused and sneered, calling him his blacksmith slave. Within …
- Caligula's name means little boot, a joke from his army childhoodAs a toddler, Gaius Julius Caesar tagged along on his father's campaigns in Germania wearing a miniature soldier's outfit, army boots included, that his mother had made to charm t…