Today, a wide-ranging palate is the mark of a snooty foodie.
Many school districts boost a teacher's salary if he or she gets a master's degree, but there's no sign that their students' scores improve.
A new study shows that newspapers make a lot of mistakes, even in the limited instances when they publish a correction.
Book review sections almost universally are loss leaders, but without them, says one former editor, "the good society vanishes and barbarism triumphs."
For years Russians deported criminals to Siberia, then were forced to import women to deal with a surfeit of lawlessness among the new residents. It remains a less than desirable locale.
Even before the advent of compulsory birth control and sterilization measures, Chinese women bore far fewer children than their European counterparts. The leading cause: less sex.
American colonists were "married to royal political spectacles" and "championed their British king with emotional intensity" right up to the eve of the Revolution, says one historian.
A brief Islamic rebirth occurred in the republic Daghestan in 1991, but it may have been doomed from the start by seven decades of Soviet rule.
Anecdotal evidence says women talk more than men. Scientific evidence says that's just idle chatter.
Novelist H. G. Wells offered visions of the future in a number of books. His predictions weren't flawless, but they often hit close to the mark.