› added 4 years ago

158

TIL America's first banned book in 1637, the "New English Canaan". The author lampoons and criticizes the Puritans and compares their leadership to crustaceans because Puritans believed that Indians were wild men that needed to be suppressed (among other thing). It's been sold at auction for $60,000

WkWGB TIL aid expert David Rieff argues that Live Aid donations helped fund a brutal resettlement programme that may have killed up to 100,000. Ethiopia remains one of Africa's poorest countries, and the whole of sub-Saharan Africa is worse off today than it was after Live Aid.
e0Y4E TIL that Shirley Temple's mother tried to make her childhood as normal as possible. She asked the parents of Shirley's friends to not let their children see her films so they wouldn't treat her differently, and she withheld all of Shirley's fan mail until she was much older.
b1ZE TIL a girl left her contacts in for six months and amoeba ate her eyes
neZJ9 TIL about the ‘Stoned Ape’ theory the idea that ingestion of psychedelic mushrooms was the "evolutionary catalyst" from which language, projective imagination, the arts, religion, philosophy, science, and all of human culture sprang.
loMV7 TIL of Ikkyū Sōjun, a Zen Masters and poet who was known for his eccentric lifestyle. He would visit brothels and drink alcohol, which were considered heretical acts. In folklore, one of his greatest pupils was a prostitute, and he preached all humans were equalm for they're all skeletons underneath