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Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused. Ergo, if you know that you are not confused then you are not conf...more

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Imagine trying to live in a world dominated by dihydrogen oxide, a compound that has no taste or smell and is so variable in its properties that it is...more

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Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back t...more

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Three hundred types of mussel, a third of the world’s total, live in the Smokies. Smokies mussels have terrific names, like purple wartyback, shiny pi...more

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I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so...more

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I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill,...more

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In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition--either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam a...more

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Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconi...more

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For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history – perhaps most – it can seem as...more

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Perhaps the most irrational fashion act of all was the male habit for 150 years of wearing wigs. Samuel Pepys, as with so many things, was in the vang...more

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It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectly comfortable, and instead covered their heads wit...more

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From that original colony sprang seven names that still feature on the landscape: Roanoke (which has the distinction of being the first Indian word bo...more

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Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, durn, gol...more

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Just a month after the completion of the Declaration of Independence, at a time when he delegates might have been expected to occupy themselves with m...more

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By the 1920s if you wanted to work behind a lunch counter you needed to know that 'Noah's boy' was a slice of ham (since Ham was one of Noah’s sons) a...more