The Church of the Holy Wisdom, or Hagia Sophia, is a former Byzantine church and former Ottoman mosque located in Istanbul, Turkey. Sadly, nothing remains today of the original Hagia Sophia, which was built on this site in the 4th century by the Emperor Constantine, the first Christian emperor and the founder of Constantinople. The Hagia Sophia was the crown jewel of a number of Christian churches built in important cities by the emperor. After the destruction of Constantine’s church, his son Constantius and the emperor Theodosius the Great build a second church at the site; however, it was burned down during riots in 532 AD and only scant fragments of the remnants of this church survive today.

Hagia Sophia was rebuilt in her present form between 532 and 537 under the personal supervision of Emperor Justinian I. After the fall of Constantinople at the hands of the Ottomans in 1453, Hagia Sophia was converted into the principal mosque of Istanbul for almost 500 years. At first, very few structural changes were made by the ruling sultanate, with only a mihrab (prayer niche), minbar (pulpit) and a wooden minaret added to the former church. However, at some point, all of the faces depicted in the church mosaics were covered with plaster due to the Islamic prohibition on figurative imagery.

In 1934, under Turkish president Kemal Atatürk, Hagia Sofia was secularized and turned into the Ayasofya Museum. The prayer rugs were removed, revealing the marble beneath, but the mosaics remained largely plastered over and the building was allowed to decay for some time. Some of the calligraphic panels were moved to other mosques, but eight roundels were left and can still be seen today.

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David Herbert Lawrence, better known as D.H. Lawrence, infamous novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist, was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire on September 11, 1885. Eastwood was a coal mining town, and Lawrence’s interest in Literature earned him a reputation as an eccentric from his fellow townsfolk. After finishing grammar school, Lawrence was given a scholarship to Nottingham High School, but he found school uninteresting and dropped out soon thereafter.

Encouraged by his friend and tutor Jessie Chambers, Lawrence began writing and teaching in 1905. However, in 1911, he quit teaching and scandalously eloped with Frieda Weekley, the German wife of one of his professors at Nottingham. The couple fled to Europe, where they were officially married in 1914 after Frieda’s divorce was finalized.

Lawrence was a rebellious writer who openly explored the then-taboo issues of sexuality and class divisions. After he published his most famous novel in 1928, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, his works became a continual source of controversy, due to his involvement in a number of widely-covered censorship cases. Sadly, Lawrence received little praise during his short lifetime, and he died of tuberculosis at the tender age of Forty-four.

Long after his death, the first uncensored publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the United States and Britain, is considered an important moment in the “sexual revolution.” Famous British poet Philip Larkin’s poem “Annus Mirabilis” even begins with a reference to the trial:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And The Beatles’ first LP.

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The Ides of March, or March 15th on the Roman calendar, was originally a festive day dedicated to the god Mars when a military parade was usually held in his honor. However, its significance was irrevocably altered after Julius Caesar was assassinated on this date in 44 B.C.; ever since then, the Ides of March has possessed a sense of foreboding. In modern times, the term “Ides of March” is most famously referenced in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when the soothsayer warns the skeptical Roman leader to, “beware the Ides of March.”

The term Ides comes from the earliest Roman calendar, which was rather confusing by modern standards, to say the least. The Roman calendar organized its months around three days, each of which served as a reference point for counting the other days.

Kalends (1st day of the month)

Nones (the 7th day in March, May, July, and October; the 5th in the other months)

Ides (the 15th day in March, May, July, and October; the 13th in the other months)

The remaining, unnamed days of the month were identified by counting backwards from the Kalends, Nones, or the Ides.

However, the Ides of March permanently took on a new significance after Caesar was assassinated, and has come to mark the specific day of abrupt change that set off a domino effect that forever changed Roman society- even Cicero’s letters after Caesar’s murder quote him as saying, ‘The Ides changed everything.”

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The rise of radio broadcasts and tabloid journalism in the 1920s fueled the emergence of national fads, such as dance marathons and mahjong. One of the most famous-albeit ridiculous-fads that became popular in the Roaring Twenties was Flagpole-sitting. Flagpole-sitting began when Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly, a professional stuntman, sat on top of a flagpole for 13 hours and 13 minutes in 1924. On a later, widely publicized attempt, Kelly was able to spend 49 days on top of a flagpole in Atlantic City, New Jersey, a feat that catapulted him into the national spotlight. Suffice it to say, the heyday of the flagpole-sitting fad lasted from 1924 to 1929.

The origins of Pole-sitting can be traced back to the ancient ascetic discipline of Stylitism, or column-sitting. Famous column-sitters include St. Simeon Stylites the Elder of Antioch who sat on a column for 37 years. The flagpole sitting craze reached its peak in 1929 when Baltimore had at least 17 boys and 3 girls sitting on 18 foot hickory poles while their family and friends cheered them on The following year, 1930, Kelly’s record was broken by Bill Penfield in Strawberry Point, Iowa who sat on a flag pole for 51 days and 20 hours, until a thunderstorm brought him down.

Daniel Baraniuk, from Gdańsk, Poland, sat on a 16-by-24-inch platform on an 8-foot pole for 196 days from May 15, 2002 to November 26, 2002. He had a ten minute break every 2 hours. Most impressively (and perhaps dubiously), H. David Werder claims that he sat on a pole for 439 days, 11 hours and six minutes to protest the high price of gasoline in the early 1980s.

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Sugar is an informal term for a class of crystalline substances made up of mainly sucrose, lactose and fructose, which has a characteristically sweet flavor and is primarily derived from sugar cane and sugar beet. Despite sugar’s enduring popularity, excessive consumption of the sweetener is linked to type 2 diabetes, obesity and tooth decay. Beginning in the 1950s with Sweet’n Low, food companies began manufacturing artificial sugar substitutes in an effort to appeal to weight conscious consumers (notably, women).

Benjamin Eisenstadt and his son Marvin Eisenstadt invented the first artificial sweetener, Sweet’n Low, in 1957. Sweet’n Low has no calories and is made out of granulated saccharin, dextrose and cream of tartar. Saccharin was first discovered in late 1800, and is between 300 and 500 times sweeter than sugar. Dextrose, which is an ingredient in all artificial sweeteners in powdered form, is a natural carbohydrate derived from corn that is used to dilute the potent saccharine to make it palatable for human tastes.

The name “Sweet’n Low” comes from an 1863 song by Sir. Joseph Barnby, which took both its title and lyrics from an Alfred Lord Tennyson poem titled, “The Princess: Sweet and Low.” While the actual U.S. patent number of the artificial sweetener is 3,625,711, their trademark of the name “Sweet’n Low and musical staff was fortuitously registered as U.S. Patent 1,000,000.

Finicky consumers now have the option of choosing amongst countless artificial sweeteners, and each new artificial sweetener that debuts promises to taste “even more” like real sugar. However, Sweet’n Low will always carry the distinction of introducing the world to artificial sweeteners.

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After World War I, American Jews became the target of anti-Semitism in America, and were especially resented in the hallowed halls of higher education. In fact, during the 1920s, many Ivy League schools, including Harvard University, moved to put a quota on the number of Jews that could be admitted at their schools in a given year. This resentment largely stemmed from the overwhelming success that Jews had achieved in higher education, especially in the East Coast: by 1919 about 80 percent of the students at Hunter College, and nearly 40 percent at Columbia University, were Jewish. Moreover, Jews won the lion’s share of academic prizes and election to Phi Beta Kappa and were perceived by resentful non-Jews as being clannish, socially awkward and unskilled at athletics.

In response to the anti-Semitic sentiment that had swept through East Coast campuses, Harvard’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell proposed a quota on the number of Jews who could gain admission to the university in 1922. Lowell was widely criticized by the Boston media for this decision, and he offered the rather dubious justification that limiting the number of Jews at Harvard to a maximum of 15% would be good for the Jews. He reasoned, “The anti-Semitic feeling among the students is increasing, and it grows in proportion to the increase in the number of Jews. If their number should become 40 percent of the student body, the race feeling would become intense.”

In fact, Harvard’s discriminatory policies against Jews under President Lowell led to the founding of Brandeis University in 1948, still commonly referred to as “the Harvard of the Jews.” Of course, these policies have long since been lifted, and Jews now constitute a full third of the Harvard student body.

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Autoimmunity is the failure of the body to recognize its own constituent parts as self, allowing an immune response against its own cells and tissues. Any disease that arises from this dysfunctional immune response is called an autoimmune disease, and includes Celiac disease, Type I diabetes and Lupus. The main function of the immune system in healthy individuals is to protect the body from disease and infection. However, in people with autoimmune disorders, their immune systems attack healthy cells by mistake as well. Autoimmune disorders tend to run in families and are more prevalent amongst certain ethnic groups. For example, women are more likely than men to suffer from autoimmune disorders, particularly women of African-American, Hispanic-American and Native-American descent.

There are well over 80 types of autoimmune diseases, and many have overlapping symptoms. The most commonly cited complaints amongst autoimmune disease sufferers are fatigue, low-grade fever and sore muscles. Autoimmune diseases can affect any part of your body, including the nerves, muscles, endocrine system and digestive system. The symptoms related to autoimmune diseases tend to wax and wane, sometimes going into remission. However, autoimmune diseases rarely resolve themselves completely. Since most autoimmune diseases are incurable, sufferers usually have to settle for treatment of only the symptoms.

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