Dee Dee Kuruneru pointed to the grayish line permanently imprinted eight feet up the wall of his nearly demolished seaside house. “That’s how high the water was,” he said. “It stayed there for ten minutes.” That extraordinary watermark was the legacy of the tsunami that overwhelmed Dee Dee’s hometown of Galle, a bustling community on the southwest coast of Sri Lanka, the… Read more »
Zachary Taylor never voted in a U.S. presidential election until he was 64 years old. That’s when the career military officer cast a ballot for himself in the 1848 election that sent him to the White House as America’s 12th chief executive. But the record for a presidential candidate voting late in life for the first time is probably held by Nelson… Read more »
It is difficult to overstate how unpleasant it was to live in a city in the ancient Mediterranean world. As historian Rodney Stark documents in his book The Triumph of Christianity, the earliest generations of Jesus’ followers tended to live and serve in urban areas like Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth and Philippi. These places were more crowded, crime-infested, and disease-ridden than… Read more »
A few years ago, Laura Lee of The Futurist magazine catalogued some of the worst expert predictions in history. They included the following: “Law will be simplified [over the next century]. Lawyers will have diminished, and their fees will have been vastly curtailed.” Better luck next century. That prediction was written by journalist Junius Henri Browne in 1893. “It doesn’t… Read more »
If you scan the horizon of professional sports in America, it’s impossible to miss the African American superstars. Who’s the greatest basketball player of all time? The current contenders are Michael Jordan and LeBron James, but MJ himself believes no one will ever surpass the accomplishments of Bill Russell. Cheryl Miller, Candace Parker, Tamika Catchings, and Maya Moore might be… Read more »
During the Golden Age of fossil hunting in the 19th century, almost all of the discoveries in the field were made by amateurs. Most of them were well-educated, upper-class males. But the greatest amateur fossil hunter of all time was quite possibly an impoverished young woman who had no formal training or education. Mary Anning (1799-1847) spent her whole life… Read more »
What could be more appropriate on Valentine’s Day than a kiss? That could be understood in several different ways, of course. It’s a given that millions of people will be enjoying at least one Hershey’s Kiss today. Those 23-calorie guilty pleasures have been on the scene since 1907. Interestingly, no one knows how they got their name. Some people insist… Read more »
In July 1982, 33-year-old Larry Walters of Long Beach, California, pulled off one of the craziest stunts in aviation history. As a child Larry had longed to fly. But poor eyesight disqualified him from pilot training. Then he got an idea. Walters attached 45 helium-filled weather balloons to his lawn chair. He strapped himself in with a few sandwiches, a… Read more »
Wonderful things can happen at the most surprising moments. Even when studying for the SAT. In the fall of 2007, John Breen, a computer programmer, was helping his son Ben prepare for his upcoming Scholastic Aptitude Test. The two sat at the kitchen table in their southern Indiana home, dutifully going through a stack of vocabulary flash cards. It was… Read more »
Every week seems to be a heartrending week. If you watch your local news, the First Awful Story is almost always about a murder, a shooting, a child abduction, a housefire, a missing person, or a rape. Then come the Covid metrics. The virus at the center of the pandemic has now claimed almost six million lives globally, and 907,500… Read more »
