Personal Highlights:

• An integral dish like Peking duck is a rarity, the exception rather than the rule. One of the reasons why Chinese restaurant menus are so...
• in a Chinese kitchen, typically cut into slivers, stir-fried with a complementary vegetable and shared by a family. Even a tiny amount of meat, fat...
• Just as English people were once suspicious of the French for ‘masking’ their ingredients with deceitful sauces, they were fearful that Chinatown cooks would try...

Personal Highlights:

• Expansion’s enthusiasts had crowed plenty about its economic promise, but what, in even the most general terms, did that mean? Most of the nation’s working...
• California’s production of $65 million in its banner year of 1852 was greater than that of all the world’s gold mines during the entire eighteenth century.
• The first forty-niners from the East found the diggings occupied by thousands of forty-eighters—Kanakas (Hawaiians), Chileans, Tasmanians, Peruvians, Sonorans, and Maidu and Pomo Indians, a...

Personal Highlights:

• To keep warm, they oiled their skin with insulating seal blubber. And in this land of fire they always kept a blaze going, using it...
• After the woman deposited the urchins in the boat, she sucked in her breath and went down for more. Bulkeley observed that some Kawésqar women...
• Constructing a single large warship could require as many as four thousand trees; a hundred acres of forest might be felled.

Personal Highlights:

• Earn to give, MacAskill called his idea. His final slide was an invitation: “If you are convinced to any extent by the arguments given above,...
• The firm’s two hundred traders all had some unusual aptitude for identifying weighted coins. Collectively they flipped coins millions of times a day. The law...
• Sam did a back-of-the-envelope calculation: if he could capture 5 percent of the entire market (a modest number, by Jane Street standards), he could make...

Personal Highlights:

• the Duke of York, over an area referred to as “the maine land of New England,” a phrase that probably determined the name of the...
• Bible, in chapter 2 of Genesis, Adam’s aloneness is the first thing God finds objectionable: “And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone.”

Personal Highlights:

• Musk and Michael Moritz went to New York to see if they could recruit Rudy Giuliani, who was just ending his tenure as mayor, to...
• “I was pretty mad, and when I get mad I try to reframe the problem.”
• He discovered that electric cars, even in places where the electricity was generated from coal, were the best for the environment. So he decided to buy one. But

Personal Highlights:

• There have been about ten thousand generations of humans so far. For all but the last three or four generations, life was short, lasting on...
• Fungi are all around us but usually only pose a severe threat to the health of the immunocompromised. Helminths are worms, some of our oldest...
• endemic disease (that is, a disease permanently established in a population) and epidemic disease (a disease that suddenly increases in prevalence, often with high mortality) have stamped our history.

Personal Highlights:

• “No children can be born in heaven,” he said. “Therefore they must all be born on earth. But this cannot be until the beginning of...
• After priests, therefore, we perform a more useful function than any other sort of men; for priests offer happiness in heaven, through the influence they...

Personal Highlights:

• The first calls for a separate independent state for India’s Muslims came in the 1930s from the political party All-India Muslim League. Great swathes of...
• In 1933, a Cambridge student, Chaudhary Rahmat Ali, published the pamphlet Now or Never. Are we to live or perish forever? Here he made the...
• As the new border was so controversial, it was not announced until August 17, 1947, three days after the declaration of independence. Months of anguish...

Personal Highlights:

• With his skill in manufacturing and fame as inventor of the cotton gin, he received an initial order for ten thousand muskets for $134,000 from...
• It became clear soon enough that cotton would not be spreading to Virginia and North Carolina in any meaningful way—production was headed farther south. Climate...
• Gibbons found himself on the wharves of New York, where he learned of the reliability and courage of a twenty-three-year-old ferry operator. Young Cornelius Vanderbilt...

Personal Highlights:

• The young man was relieved that the other had not gone on with his first question. He did not have to say what Iqbal he...
• He was a magistrate, not a missionary. It was the day-to-day problems to which he had to find answers. He had no need to equate...

Personal Highlights:

• California had plenty of engineers trained in aviation or radio industries who’d graduated from Stanford or Berkeley, each of which was flush with defense dollars as the U.S. military
• A single missile strike on TSMC’s most advanced chip fabrication facility could easily cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage once
• which moved metal levers that adjusted glass mirrors. These knobs and levers “computed” altitudes and angles more exactly than any pilot could, focusing the sight...