When to Drop Your Knowledge:
King Arthur can rescue you, with his trademark gallantry, from many a boring conversation. Whether you’re chatting with a fan of Keira Knightly, creative anachronism, Monty Python, or young adult fantasy novels, knowledge of Arthurian legend is a must.

The Basics
If King Arthur existed, he was probably a Brit living in the late fifth and early sixth century CE who fought the Saxons. But aside from a few vague references to Arthur in first millennium stories, it’s difficult to pin all that down. In truth, the historicity of Arthur doesn’t matter all that much. His significance lies in the stories about him that were passed down to us, and that tale begins with Geoffrey of Monmouth.

In 1133, Geoffrey (who, like Geoffrey the Toys R Us giraffe, has no last name) published Historia Regum Britannie, a bestseller (or the 12th century version of a bestseller, anyway) that tells the story of Arthur. Through his tale, the gallant king, with the help of some gallant knights and some distressed damsels, became the romantic hero for all England.

Here’s how it would go: Arthur gathers his knights (see sidebar) at the world-famous Round Table at Camelot (which would sometimes feature the wizard Merlin). They would set off on a series of crazy quests—most famously a search for the Holy Grail. After a series of hurdles, they achieve their goal.

And that, more or less, is the plot of most every happy-ending novel ever written. Those were not, however, the only endings. Many of the stories concluded with Arthur’s death in the battle of Camlann, fought against his son, Mordred, or with an affair between Arthur’s knight Lancelot and Queen Guinevere resulting in the downfall of Camelot. Those two endings represent the two prominent types of not-happy-ending stories—death and the loss of power. Such is the significance of Arthurian legend. Although stories of Arthur and Camelot were certainly not the first to use these plotting techniques, they were among the most influential and widely read.

Arthur and the residents of Camelot have proven to be a durable set of characters–they’ve been used everywhere from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King to Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to the Saturday morning cartoon Gargoyles. That’s a résumé King Arthur can live with–assuming, of course, he ever lived.

Other Round Tableans
Lancelot.
The greatest knight of the Round Table, and Guinevere’s lover.

Percival.
The star of the quest for the Holy Grail, and the knight of the Round Table with the nerdiest name.

Galahad.
The purest knight of the Round Table, he was taken up to heaven after finding the Grail.

Merlin.
The Round Table’s crazy wizard, who is the inspiration for most every fictional wizard since.

Guinevere.
The Round Table was for Boys Only, but Guinevere— as queen consort and Lancelot’s lover—casts a constant shadow on the boys’ goings-on.

Despite its portrayal in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, those searching for the Holy Grail weren’t looking for a bejeweled wineglass. They were after an ordinary-looking (if very old) shallow bowl, not unlike a kitten’s water bowl, used by Christ at the Last Supper. (The word grail comes from the old Latin gradalis, meaning “a flat dish.”)

EXCALIBURS
Arthur’s sword Excalibur, which he famously pulled from a stone, is probably the most famous sword in all of history. But don’t discount these:

THE MAN: Julius Ceasar
THE SWORD: Yellow Death (Crocea Mors)
SO CALLED BECAUSE: nobody who got struck by it lived to tell the tale.

THE MEN: Ancient English Kings
THE SWORD: Curtana
SO CALLED BECAUSE: of Irony, perhaps. Though “curtana” means the cutter, the Curtana itself was always blunt, emblematic of mercy.

THE MAN: Charlemagne
THE SWORD: Joyeuse
SO CALLED BECAUSE: Apparently, using it made Charlemagne “merry,” which explains his fondness for beheadings.

Conversation Starters
◆ The film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which is unquestionably the greatest film ever to emerge from the Arthurian legends, features at one point a picture of “God.” “God” is actually 19th-century cricket player W. G. Grace, who was the Babe Ruth of cricket (Grace’s career lasted 36 years). He also looked—there’s no denying it—a lot like modern depictions of God, complete with the full, thick beard.

◆ A large percentage of the budget from Holy Grail, incidentally, came from donations given by members of rock bands Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.

◆ In 1522, British king Henry VIII (he of the many wives, some of whom were beheaded) ordered that his replica of Arthur’s famous Round Table be painted with a likeness of King Arthur. Unfortunately, no actual image of Arthur was available, but this didn’t dissuade the king. Never a modest chap, Henry decided that the image of Arthur in the painting should be modeled after, you guessed it, Henry VIII.

◆ Some sources assert that King Arthur, while he was really great and everything, might have had a slight problem with incest (which, in his defense, was pretty rampant back then). They claim that Mordred was the child of Arthur and his half-sister Morgause.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Ms. Woolf’s tragic life story will be helpful if you ever have to talk a cocktail party companion down off the edge of a roof deck, for sure. But she’ll also be extremely helpful to you when you’re chatting up a gender studies major and get called upon to prove your feminist chops. (That goes for you, too, boys; feminism isn’t just for the ladies anymore.)

The Basics
Woolf grew up in an intellectual family, but didn’t begin writing books until she was in her 30s, after she’d married Leonard Woolf and founded the Hogarth Press. Virginia’s first two novels, while excellent, were stylistically traditional. But after World War I, she began to experiment, especially with the idea of time and conceptions of gender—themes that would become central to the modernist movement that she helped spearhead.

To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway are perhaps Woolf’s most famous novels. Massively introspective, discursive, and stylistically challenging, To the Lighthouse might not be the book to take with you to the beach. As in many great literary novels, what happens (the Ramsey family, over the course of several years, finally arrives at a lighthouse) takes a backseat to the brilliance of the story’s telling and the entrancing complexities of Woolf’s language. For instance: Time passes in inverse proportion to the number of words in each section, a kind of novelistic interpretation of Einsteinian relativity.

Woolf was also a vitally important force in 20th-century feminism. Her nonfiction book A Room of One’s Own remains the greatest description of the difficulties a female writer faces. She famously argued that to make one’s way in the literary world, one needed only 50 pounds a month and a room of her own.

Woolf’s literary importance can hardly be overstated. Along with writers like James Joyce, she argued that literature could no longer ignore the inner workings of characters’ lives but instead had to confront the complexity of being human head-on.

The complexity of Woolf’s humanity, sadly, met an unfortunate end. She was plagued throughout her life with periods of insufferable depression. In 1941, Woolf wrote a heartbreaking suicide note to her husband, filled her pockets with stones, and drowned herself in the River Ouse. Although the marriages of major writers have often been marked by neglect, infidelity, and general misery, Virginia and Leonard had a remarkably loving relationship. In her suicide note, she wrote, “I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.” For her, perhaps. But for the rest of us, losing whatever writing Woolf had before her was definitely not the best thing.

Drowning Poetic
While it’s more or less par for the course for poets to die tragically, a surprisingly large percentage of them end up literally drowning their sorrows.
Besides Woolf:

Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The Romantic poet drowned in a mysterious boating accident on July 8, 1822. Rumors have swirled ever since that it was suicide.

Hart Crane.
Perhaps tired of being known as the third-best American poet of his time (behind e.e. cummings and T. S. Eliot), in 1932, he said, “Good-bye, everybody!” and then leapt from the deck of a cruise ship. His body was never found.

Li Po.
The best poet in eighth-century China, Li Po purportedly drowned while drunkenly trying to embrace the reflection of the moon in the Yangtze River.

Conversation Starters
◆ While there’s no question that the work of James Joyce influenced Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf held a generally low opinion of Joyce and thought him a misogynist.

◆ As a child, Woolf and her sister, Vanessa (who became a prominent interior designer), were sexually abused by their half-brothers. Courageously, Woolf wrote of the abuse openly and without shame in her short memoir Moments of Being.

◆ Sister Vanessa, incidentally, was engaged in a very odd love quadrangle. Vanessa had an open marriage with British critic Clive Bell. She ended up having an affair with the bisexual painter Duncan Grant. Together, they had a daughter, Angelica, who ended up marrying Grant’s one-time male lover, the British writer David Garnett.

◆ Grant, Garnett, Vanessa Bell, and Virginia Woolf were all members of the loose association known as the Bloomsbury Group, so called because they would hang out together in fancy houses in the Bloomsbury section of London. The Bloomsburies also included novelist E. M. Forster and economist John Maynard Keynes.

◆ Although we liked The Hours and enjoy a good cry as much as anyone, Woolf scholars were notably displeased with her portrayal in both the book and the movie. Many felt that novelist Michael Cunningham completely misrepresented Woolf, with
one Woolf biographer going so far as to say that the film version “evacuates her life of political intelligence or social acumen” and reduces her to a “doomed, fey, mad victim.” Burn. (The Hours, incidentally, was Woolf’s working title for the novel that became Mrs. Dalloway.)

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Voltaire lends himself to a number of conversational topics: reason, promiscuity, Deism, the surprising attractiveness of female mathematicians, and the rights of those accused of crimes. This is the great joy of getting to know a multifaceted famous person.

The Basics
Although widely considered to be among the greatest French writers ever, very little of Voltaire’s work is read today. Voltaire was born François-Marie Arouet (why he picked the pen name Voltaire is an enduring mystery) into a middle-class family. Initially, Voltaire gained prominence as sort of the Dorothy Parker of 18th-century France. His aphorisms (e.g., “Common sense is not so common”) were widely quoted, but he wanted more.

Never a terribly modest man (“Paradise is where I am,” he once noted), the young Voltaire wanted to be France’s Virgil, an epic poet who would reinvigorate French intellectualism. Unfortunately, Voltaire wasn’t that great a poet. His one epic poem, Henriade, reads like someone competing for an award for Worst Imitation of Virgil.

Then he got thrown into the Bastille after an argument with a nobleman who’d made fun of the name Voltaire. (Really.) The next decades of his life were spent in periodic exile, as Voltaire began writing plays and history that openly criticized the irrational and outmoded morality of Church and government alike.

In 1734, Voltaire met the love of his life, Gabrielle-Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet, who unfortunately was married, but fortunately was married to a guy who didn’t seem to care that she spent all her time with Voltaire. Their love affair lasted 15 years, until Châtelet’s death during childbirth. (See sidebar.) Not until he was 64 did he write the Enlightenment classic Candide, a long short story detailing the sad life of a young philosopher who finally realizes the only way to happiness is “to cultivate one’s own garden.” This commonsense, nonidealized construction of happiness became identified forever after with Voltaire.

His other central contribution also came late in life. After he retired to a large estate in the town of Ferney, Voltaire began more actively crusading against oppression and bigotry. His writing advocated religious tolerance, the abolition of torture, and civil rights of commoners. It was in these liberal polemics, almost all of them written when he was an old man, that he truly established his lasting reputation.

Mme du Châtelet
Voltaire had many, many affairs, but Mme du Châtelet was the love of his life. And no wonder. While most women of her generation were demure homebodies, Mme du Châtelet was a mathematician and physicist. After meeting Voltaire, she endeavored to learn English so she could translate Newton’s The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy into French, hoping that it might bring about a move toward reason and scientific exploration. She died in 1749, and it was seven more years before her translation of Newton began to be published. Amazingly, however, it did indeed lead to a reinvigorated interest in scientific study, bolstering the Enlightenment ideals she and Voltaire both cherished.

God Bless ‘Em
After Voltaire purchased his estate at Ferney, he rebuilt the church there, and wasn’t bashful about it. Above the church door read the inscription “Deio Erexit VOLTAIRE” (”Erected to God by Voltaire”), which was blasphemous if only because Voltaire made his own name so much bigger than God’s. Even though Voltaire wrote extensively about the irrationality and dangers of the Church (and publicly stated that he didn’t believe Jesus every existed), he somehow convinced the pope himself to send him a relic–that is, a piece of a dead saint’s body–to sanctify Voltaire’s crazy church.

Conversation Starters
◆ Although Voltaire came from a fairly well-off family, he didn’t become really rich until he played the lottery. In 1728, a friend of Voltaire’s noticed that the French government had accidentally created a lottery in which the prize money was significantly larger than the cost of all the tickets combined. So Voltaire formed a syndicate, bought all the tickets and won the lottery.

◆ Voltaire had many hated rivals, but he reviled no man quite so much as Élie-Catherine Fréron, a journalist who attacked the ideas of the Enlightenment and savagely panned one of Voltaire’s plays (Fréron was right on that count—the play was horrible). Voltaire disliked Fréron so deeply that he had a painting of Fréron displayed in his dining room at Ferney. Of course, the portrait was no ordinary pic: It featured a terrified Fréron getting whipped by a band of demons.

◆ Like a lot of intellectuals who’d come after him, Voltaire loved coffee—really, really loved it, to the tune of a purported 50 cups a day (the cups were smaller than today’s uber-grande lattes, but still!). So the next time someone says coffee is bad for you, point out that, in an era when popular treatments for disease included leeches and “quieting the nervous energy,” Voltaire lived to the ripe old age of 83.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
The Ulyssesian hero has become so common that you’re sure to find a way to work him in somewhere. Whether it’s a discussion of Finding Nemo, Kerouac’s On the Road, or O Brother Where Art Thou?, parallels abound. Plus, when you, the designated driver, leave the party to get more beer, you won’t just be headed to the 7-Eleven anymore—you’ll be embarking upon an odyssey.

The Basics
Smart, resourceful, and courageous, Odysseus is the epic hero (sorry, Achilles, but you have a heel and Odysseus doesn’t). His story—and everything about Odysseus is mere story, since unlike other heroes of epic poems he never existed—begins during the Trojan War, when the wily Odysseus said (we are paraphrasing): “What if we built a Trojan horse and then when they look the gift horse in the mouth we attack?!” Which is what they did, and the Battle for Troy was won.

The Trojan horse would have made a fine end to a lesser story, but Odysseus’s battles, as told in the Odyssey, were only beginning. For the next two years, the sailor and his men hopped from island to island and challenge to challenge. They ate locusts with the Locust Eaters, looted the city of Ciconia, killed a Cyclops who happened to be kin to the sea god Neptune, briefly got turned into pigs, and ventured into the Underworld. Then Odysseus washed ashore on a magical island inhabited by a nymph named Calypso, whereupon he cheated on his wife (against his will, of course! She had a mysterious power, this Calypso) for seven years.

It was not until Zeus himself told Calypso to let Odysseus be that the great and cunning warrior finally returned home to Ithaca, where his gorgeous wife, Penelope, had been fending off suitors for nearly a decade. Odysseus then showed the kind of level-headed nature common to epic heroes and action movie protagonists by killing all of Penelope’s suitors in a fast-paced bow-and-arrow battle. For 2,500-year-old stuff, the story of Odysseus/Ulysses is an action-packed thrill ride.

And that, in part, explains Ulysses’s continuing significance. His character–clever, hardworking, dedicated, and just unlucky enough to find himself in fascinating scrapes–has proved as durable as the odyssey, a word we had to take from Homer because he captured it so perfectly.

The Multifaceted Ulysses
Ulysses has proven such a fascinating and versatile character that he has appeared countless times in art. A few of his best appearances during his 2,500-year career were in:
• Greek tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides
• Virgil’s Aeneid.
• Ovid’s poems
• Dante’s Inferno
• Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida
• Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem Ulysses
• and, perhaps most important, in the 1981 anime classic Ulysses 31, in which a 31st-century Ulysses must travel through space in search of the kingdom of Hades.

Seeking Homer
Did Homer exist? No one knows, but scholars still manage to fight about it. Some maintain that the same person wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey; others claim that it was two distinct poets from the same school of poetry. Either way, many academics believe that the epics were created by countless storytellers over centuries before finally being written down. And as the literary paper title “Homer–Who Was She?” proves, some scholars also argue that Homer was a woman.

Conversation Starters
◆ The full name of Ulysses in the original Greek is Odysseus Laertiades, which literally means “Odysseus, the Son of Laertes.” But in later Greek sources, Odysseus’s father was often identified as Sisyphus, the crafty murderer who got his comeuppance when he had to spend all eternity in Hades pushing a rock up a hill.

◆ One thing’s for sure: The Odyssey wasn’t written by noted American intellectual Homer Simpson, nor was he named for the poet. Despite rumors to the contrary, Homer was also not named for the character “Homer Simpson” in Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust. The truth is Homer Simpson is named Homer because Homer was the name of Simpsons’s creator Matt Groening’s father. Poor Homer Groening. D’oh-ing from the grave, we’re sure.

◆ The Odyssey wasn’t originally a text—it was a memorized poem recited by bands of actors who spoke an amalgamated language. So, if Homer existed, he didn’t just create the two greatest epics of all time in the Iliad and the Odyssey. He also created an entire dialect. Homeric Greek, which is distinct from all other forms of ancient Greek, mixed together several dialects to produce the language Homer thought superior.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Bibliophiles everywhere will find your knowledge of Ulysses both enchanting and intimidating, and you can speak with authority about it, because—in all likelihood—they haven’t read it either.

The Basics
James Joyce once wrote of Ulysses, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.” Mission accomplished. In 2000, Ulysses was hailed by the Modern Language Association as the greatest novel of the 20th century, but not everyone can even agree that it is a novel. It is, regardless, hilarious and self-referential and dazzlingly, ostentatiously brilliant—but most of all, it is extraordinarily difficult to read.

And yet, the plot is quite simple. Two men—a Jewish adman named Leopold Bloom and a young man with writerly aspirations named Stephen Dedalus—walk around Dublin, together and apart, on June 16, 1904. That’s it. Not much happens: Stephen teaches some bored kids English; a fellow is buried; Bloom goes to a bar; Bloom and Stephen go to a brothel but don’t hire anyone, etc. Told from a dizzying array of perspectives, often in the best stream-of-consciousness prose ever produced, Ulysses is much more than what happens. It’s a perverted retelling of the Odyssey, a meditation on human consciousness, an exploration of nationalism, and an annoyingly punny comic novel (“Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job”).

It took Joyce seven years to write Ulysses, which he composed primarily while living in exile in Zurich and Trieste. But you wouldn’t know he was a decade removed from life in Dublin to read the novel—Joyce imagined 1904 Dublin so perfectly that you could for many years precisely retrace Bloom’s steps.

The Quotable Ulysses
Ulysses really is worth reading if you can find the time and summon the dedication. But if you can’t, you can—like many millions before you—just pretend to have read it. Memorize these three quotes and you should be fine.

If someone says that Ulysses is a tough read, you say:
“Indeed it is. I laughed out loud when I read ‘I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.’ ”

If someone is talking about the themes of Ulysses, you say:
“My favorite line is ‘History, said Stephen, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ ”

And finally, if someone points out that you’ve just said something ridiculously untrue about Ulysses, you say:
“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and the portals to discovery.”

Bloomsday
Every June 16, literary nerds across the world band together to celebrate Bloomsday, an annual celebration of all things Ulysses. Readings are staged, academics present papers at conferences, and Dublin hosts marathon pub crowds. (Well, that happens on a lot of other days, too, but you get our drift.) In 2004, the 100th anniversary of Bloom’s exploits, the city of Dublin served 10,000 visitors a free breakfast on Dublin’s main thoroughfare, O’Connel Street.

A VERY FORWARD FOREWORD
After a magazine serialized a chapter from Ulysses featuring masturbation, that chapter (and then the entire book) was decided obscene and banned from the U.S. A trial finally ensued in 1933 (which had a great title: “United States v. One Book Called Ulysses“). In the end, Judge John M. Woolsey ruled that the book was not obscene but was in fact “an amazing tour de force.” Woolsey should have been a book reviewer! Joyce was so impressed with Woolsey’s cogent, well-written judgment that Joyce insisted it be published as a kind of foreword to the book in the United States.

Conversation Starters
◆ When a young James Joyce and an aging W. B. Yeats (the two literary titans of 20th-century Ireland) first met, Joyce was stunningly pretentious. “We have met too late,” Joyce told Yeats. “You are too old for me to have any effect on you.”

◆ Joyce could have a sense of humor in conversation. When a young fan approached Joyce and asked if he could “kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses,” Joyce replied, “No. It did lots of other things, too.”

◆ The final chapter of Ulysses contains only eight sentences, though it is dozens of pages long (also, the chapter features no commas). Narrated in a stream of consciousness by Bloom’s wife, Molly, the longest sentence in the chapter (known as “Penelope”) is 4,391 words long. It held the record as longest sentence in a published novel from Ulysses’s publication in 1922 until 2001, when Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club, containing a 13,950-word sentence, was published.

◆ Joyce chose June 16, 1904, not for some complicated, metaphorically resonant reason, but because it was on June 16, 1904, that he and Nora Barnacle—who would later become his wife—went on their first date.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Quoting Twain will make you seem funny and smart. Below, we’ll give you wry quotes on three popular small-talk topics: the weather, Congress, and the French.

The Basics
Samuel Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River. Both Hannibal and the Mighty Mississippi would play a profound role in his writing career. As a young man he worked as a steamboat captain on the river, a job he would recount with awe and love in his greatest nonfiction book, Life on the Mississippi. And Hannibal would serve as the model for Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn’s hometown in Twain’s best-remembered novels.

But Twain’s writing career began in the wild American West. Having failed as a businessman (for the first of what would be many times), Twain began writing humorous sketches about the American West that captured dialect with his distinctly literal rendering of Americans’ eccentric speechifying. The best of these, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Caleveras County,” made Twain a national celebrity (and, years later, would result in Calaveras High School picking the bullfrog as its mascot). His early career was marked by light and exceedingly funny writings—the Bill Bryson of his day, he got rich off humorous travelogues like Roughing It and The Innocents Abroad. And while these books were ostensibly nonfiction, Twain never had a problem stretching the truth—he once claimed, for instance, that the Egyptians used mummies to power their locomotives. Late in his career, however, Twain’s work (although still funny) became darker and increasingly bitter, vociferously attacking religion and the injustices within American society.

Twain was perched between the light and dark phases of his career when he wrote his best book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Originally published for adolescents, Huck Finn is at once a classic adventure story, a hilarious introduction to the many characters of the river, and a superb attack on the racist and class-dominated social order of the day. The only knock on Twain is that he never wrote another Huck Finn. But to paraphrase Joseph Heller: If Twain never wrote anything like Huck Finn ever again, well–neither did anyone else.

Bad Books
Twain was perhaps more inconsistent than any other major American author. Even his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is often criticized for its last third, when the book veers from its compelling themes of conscience, racism, and nationalism, and becomes mere shenanigans. Some of his books were consistent—consistently awful. Among the ones you don’t see in book stores much anymore:
• Two sequels to Tom Sawyer: Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective.
• Christian Science, a relentless, hilarious, and somewhat misogynistic attack on the religion and its founder, Mary Baker Eddy.
• 1601, a sort of pauper’s The Prince and the Pauper, without the good plot.
• And, of course, A Dog’s Tale, in which Twain fell into the all-too-common trap of telling a story from a dog’s perspective.

Quotable Twain
Presaging contemporary American opinions of France:
“France had neither winter nor summer nor morals–apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.”

Presaging the banning of:
“First God created idiots. That was just for practice. Then he created school boards.”

On weather:
“Climate is what we expect; weather is what we get..” (Note: Twain never said, “Everyone talks about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it.” That’s a misattribution.)

On Congress:
“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except congress.”

THE HIGHEST PRAISE
Among Twain’s biggest fans are many of the American authors who came after him. Faulkner called him “the first truly American writer.” And Ernest Hemingway, in particular, admired Twain. He once said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn…There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” That last sentence means a lot coming from Hemingway, because he fancied himself awfully, awfully good.

Conversation Starters
◆ Most of us know that Samuel Clemens is generally believed to have picked the pen name Mark Twain, which he first used when he was 27, as a reference to Mississippi riverboat captain slang for “two fathoms deep” (thus, just barely navigable). But some students of Twain argue for an alternate theory: When he first used the name in his wild days in the West, they argue, he would stop in at a saloon, buy two drinks, and tell the bartender to “mark twain” on his tab.

◆ Twain was born in 1835, a year when Halley’s comet was visible from Earth. In 1909, he wrote, “I came in with Halley’s Comet . . . and I expect to go out with it.” Indeed, he did. When he died on April 21, 1910, the comet was still visible in the night sky.

◆ Although Twain professed to hate captains of industry, it was an executive from Standard Oil, Henry H. Rogers, who helped Twain organize his finances toward the end of Twain’s life. The two became great friends, and one might accuse Twain of hypocrisy, except Rogers was no ordinary industrialist: Although he was nicknamed “Hellhound Rogers” for his hardnosed business deals, he was a secret softy. Rogers helped pay for the schooling of Helen Keller, quietly helped build elementary schools for African Americans in the South, and helped fund Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Stories of Tesla’s loneliness and underappreciated genius can comfort any friends you have who’ve been recently dumped or recently fired. They’re also good to know in case anyone ever says anything flattering about Thomas Edison. Sure, Tommy E. was a great inventor, you can say. But he was also a first-rate thief.

The Basics
Nikola Tesla was a Serbian who emigrated to the United States in 1884. A contemporary of Edison and Westinghouse, both of whose names ended up in major corporations, Tesla was probably the greater inventor, but he ended up poverty-stricken and massively underappreciated. Tesla was responsible for the first practical use of alternating current (AC)—the electrical current that constantly reverses direction and is the heart of electric power for most of the world. Tesla’s AC dynamos bested Edison’s work with direct current by a wide margin, and AC eventually won the battle to light the world. But that’s not all: Tesla also invented the Tesla coil—a gadget still used in radio and television transmission. He also messedaround with early radar, neon, X rays, and aircraft design. (This is what happens when you don’t give kids a Nintendo.)

In some ways, Tesla was the prototypical immigrant success story: He arrived in America with four pennies, a few poems he’d written, and blueprints for a flying machine (that never got built). But by 1900, his greatest successes were behind him. Working out of his Colorado laboratory, Tesla had his version of a midlife crisis. His business ventures failed; he started to believe aliens from another planet were signaling earth; and most impressive, he claimed to have invented a “death ray” that could destroy thousands of airplanes from hundreds of miles away. (The death ray, like most of Tesla’s later inventions, was never built for lack of funds.) His last years were even more depressing. Increasingly eccentric, Tesla lived in a series of New York hotel rooms, virtually friendless.

So how come he’s not that famous? For one thing, he never patented most of his inventions. For another, other inventors took credit for many of Tesla’s ideas and innovations, which is why major corporations are named after Edison and Westinghouse, while Tesla can only lay claim to the eponymous minor rock band.

Extra Credit: EDISON
In 1884, Tesla got a job with Thomas Edison. The relationship was contentious, and during one of their many arguments, Tesla suggested he could improve Edison’s electricity and save him money. Edison replied, “There’s $50,000 in it for you if you can do it.” After slaving away for months, Tesla made huge improvements by redesigning Edison’s systems and installing automatic controls. When Tesla asked Edison to pay up, Edison responded, “Tesla, you don’t understand American humor.” Ha. Ha.

Ignoble Nobels
In 1943 the Supreme Court invalidated most of the patents held by Italian inventor Guglielmo Marcani for radio equipment and gave Tesla credit for the invention of radio based on patents that predated Marconi’s. Little good it did Tesla, though, because by that time MArconi had already won fame, riches, and a Nobel Prize for his “work,” while Tesla was, um, dead. Tesla never won the Nobel–unless you count the one he got for Marconi. In fact, he was devastated in 1915 when rumors of a shared prize between him and Edison proved untrue. (The winners: William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg, for their work on X-ray crystallography. The Braggs, incidentally, remain the only father and son ever to see a Nobel.)

Tesla once predicted, “The household’s daily newspaper will be printed ‘wirelessly’ in the home during the night.” Maybe the Supreme Court should give the guy credit for the Internet, too.

Conversation Starters
◆ By the age of five, young Tesla had already invented his own waterwheel and read the 100-volume set of the Complete Voltaire. By comparison, we could, um, count to 10 and pretty regularly avoid peeing on ourselves.

◆ Celibate throughout his life, Tesla also feared round objects (which perhaps goes along with the celibacy). He once said, “I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by the married man.” The wedding ring, perhaps?

◆ Tesla would have been great fun at parties. At the Chicago Columbia Exposition of 1893, he sent 200,000 volts through his body to prove that electricity was safe. It was, although his hair stood on end for a week.

◆ One of Tesla’s best friends was another great non-Nobel-winning genius who managed to fritter away lots of money: Mark Twain.

◆ Not one for modesty, Tesla often signed his name with the letters G.I., short for Great Inventor.

Lao-tzu (pronunciation: LAO-tsuh): Literally, “Old Man,” “Lao-tzu” is both the same book as the Tao-te Ching and the name of the person who purportedly wrote it. If this strikes you as confusing, just wait. It gets worse.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Fans of Chinese religion will obviously be pleased with your ability to intelligently discuss the Tao. But the surest cocktail party use for the Tao-te Ching is to calm down belligerent, verbose drunks. “To use words but rarely,” you can quote to them, “is to be natural.”

The Basics
The Tao-te Ching, originally known to its Chinese audience as Lao-tzu, is an extremely short, esoteric book of verse that, along with the works of Confucius, shaped Chinese philosophy and religion for two millennia. While Confucianism emphasized respect for authority, proper behavior, and building better communities through civilization, Taoism emphasized natural societies and, indeed, living in accordance with the world as it currently is.

This would be an excellent time to say what, exactly, the Tao, means—but sadly, we can’t. To quote the very first line of the Tao-te Ching: “The Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao.” But that won’t keep us from trying. Tao is often translated “the Way,” and it’s taken to mean the harmony of the cosmos. Our job, as people, is not to fight against that harmony, but instead, submit to it.

The Tao-te Ching is often considered an esoteric, mystical work, because it is rife with paradox. “My words are very easy to understand and very easy to put into practice, yet no one in the world can understand them or put them into practice,” for instance, doesn’t make much sense—at least not initially. But Taoism embraces such paradoxes and they often eventually prove sensical. Although “the strength of softness” may seem oxymoronical, Taoism takes the example of water: Although it flows with the stream and is exceedingly soft, it has the power to slowly wear down earth and rock. The goal of the Tao-te Ching is to help people accept the inevitability of change and find a way to end the conflict that results from resistance to change. It’s no wonder that most scholars believe it was authored during a tumultuous period of Chinese history marked by philosophical disagreements and warring factions battling for power.

Taoism first became popular in China in the late third century CE, and while neo-Confucianism remained the state religion until Mao Tse-tung made the state religion “worshipping me, Mao Tse-tung” in 1949, Taoism remained popular–and not necessarily mutually exclusive to Confucianism or Buddhism. In fact, it isn’t uncommon for people in China to identify themselves as being both Buddhist and Taoist, or Confucianist and Taoist, or all three.

The Tao of Everything
The Tao-te Ching itself espouses antimaterialistic values and a general opposition toward naked ambition. But this hasn’t stopped authors from capitalizing on the inherent “cool factor” of Taoism to twist its fundamental beliefs into fame and profit. The first, and generally least inaccurate, book in the “Tao of” genre was Benjamin Hoff’s 1983 The Tao of Pooh, which argued that we should all be more Taoist, and also more like Winnie the Pooh. But after that, the “Tao of” books spiraled out of control. A selection of the several dozen “Tao of” books currently in print:

The Tao of Physics
The Tao of Leadership
The Tao of Equus
The Tao of Sobriety
The Tao of Photography
And, of course, that major American literary classic, The Tao of Network Security Monitoring.

The Tao of Who?
In all probability, Lao-tzu never existed. Tradition states that Lao-tzu was an older contemporary of Confucius (who was a historical person, and lived from 551 to 479 BCE). But most scholars believe that the Tao-te Ching was not a single work from a single person but rather a collection that was refined over the course of decades and possibly even centuries. Still, images of Lao-tzu–a bearded and happy man with a more-than-happy man with a more-than-passing resemblance (skin color aside) to Yoda–abound.

Conversation Starters
◆ Lots of people think Taoism means “being chill.” After all, one of the guiding principles of the Tao is that one ought to go with the flow (the flow of the Tao, that is). But not all Taoists have been laid-back peacemakers. Far from it. Consider Guan Yu, the third-century Chinese general who is revered by Taoists as a guardian deity. Usually portrayed as a red-faced, sword-carrying warrior, Guan Yu helped overthrow the Han dynasty and is said to have severed more than a few heads.

◆ Early Taoists were obsessed with internal alchemy, which involves not the making of gold from base metals but rather refining one’s body and mind in the hopes of achieving long life and, ideally, immortality. Some attempted to bring a permanent and immortal harmony to their body through exercise and dietary restrictions (as, really, we do today). But other Taoist alchemists invented potions and charms that they hoped would give them long life. Internal alchemy was occasionally fatal, and always ineffective—but then again, so was regular alchemy.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Whenever anyone calls the Hebrew Bible the Old Testament, for starters. But your knowledge of the Tanakh is also sure to be a hit at bat and bar mitzvahs. Of course, you’ll probably need the conversation to pass the time, because even though they mark the entrance into adulthood, the “bar” in bar mitzvah rarely stands for open bar.

The Basics
Tanakh is an acronym from the initial letters of the Hebrew words Torah, meaning “The Law,” Nevi’im, meaning “Prophets,” and Ketuvim (meaning “Writings”). These three categories of writing compose the Hebrew Bible, which most Christians know as the Old Testament.

The Torah includes the five books of Moses—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—which introduce the beginnings of human history (with Adam and Eve) and Jewish history (with Abraham, who both Jews and Muslims view as their patriarch). It is also the basis for most Jewish law. (Traditionally, the law of Moses is said to contain exactly 613 commandments.)

The Nevi’im is the writings of the Prophets. From Joshua to Ezekiel, the Prophets exhorted the Jewish community to live up to their covenant with God as his chosen people. They promised, cajoled, and threatened. For much of Jewish history, there was disagreement about which prophets ought to be considered canonical, but a conference of rabbis around 100 CE set down the Nevi’im as we read it today.

The Ketuvim includes everything else. It includes the oddest, and arguably the most beautiful writing in the Christian and Jewish canon. Truly a miscellany, the Ketuvim includes history (Nehemiah), devotional poetry (the Psalms), prophecy that didn’t end up in the Nevi’im (Daniel), disconcertingly erotic poetry (the Song of Songs), and the saddest story ever told (Job). The books of the
Ketuvim were not canonized as a group, like the other two sections of the Tanakh, but instead were brought into the scriptures individually, usually because regular people liked them so much. This created the mishmash feel of the Ketuvim, but also ensured the enduring popularity of most of its books. Although Christians reading the Tanakh usually see it as a kind of forerunner to the New Testament, and find within it prophecies about Jesus, it is read quite differently in Judaism. It is a testament to the remarkable survival and flourishing of a small band of people who believed in one God long before it was popular, who suffered persecution again and again but always emerged intact, and whose greatness lies not in their numbers but in their commitment to, and faith in, the one true God.

Talmud
The Talmud, which began to be recorded around 200 BCE, holds a place in Jewish tradition second only to the Tanakh. The work of many Rabbinic scholars, the Talmud includes law passed down orally as well as critical and interpretive commentary on scripture. The Talmudic authors sought to fill out the Jewish law outlined in the Torah so as to help people live holy and spiritual lives. Today, however, most Reform Jews and many others reject the Talmud as an excessively legalistic and sort of crushingly nonspiritual text. But Orthodox Jews in particular continue to adhere to the law as set forth in the Talmud.

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE? THE HEBREW BIBLE EDITION
So what’s the difference between the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament? The Catholic Old Testament includes “the Apocrypha,” several books that both Protestants and Jews decided weren’t canonical. The Protestant Old Testament is identical, but the order of the books is different. Still, though, it’s offensive to many Jewish people to call the Hebrew Bible the Old Testament, because it implies the existence of a New Testament, and Judaism does not believe in any such thing.

Conversation Starters
◆ Like many a Yugoslavian town name, the Hebrew text of the Tanakh originally contained only consonants. Pronunciation of words was passed down orally until the early Middle Ages, when diacritical marks were added to codify the pronunciation.

◆ In the Christian Old Testament, Kings, Samuel, and Chronicles are each divided into two books. This wasn’t originally the case with the Tanakh, but the three books proved too long for the scrolls that early Christians used, so they divided them.

◆ Almost all of the Tanakh was composed in Hebrew. The exceptions consist of two words in Genesis, a sentence in Jeremiah, two in Ezra, and almost half the Book of David. These sections were all written in Aramaic, which was spoken by many Jews for millennia, and by the cast of The Passion of the Christ for a few months. By contrast, the New Testament was probably written entirely in ancient Greek, except for one sentence of Aramaic. In the Gospel According to Mark, Jesus’ last words are recorded as the Aramaic “elo’i elo’i lama sabachthani,” or “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Halicarnassus (pronunciation: Hal-ee-car-NASS-uss).
Asia Minor city no longer in existence.

Babylon (pronunciation: like Babylon 5 sans the 5).
Ancient Mesopotamian city and former seat of the Babylonian Empire. No longer in existence.

Rhodes (pronunciation: like roads).
Island chronologically controlled by the Greeks, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Turks, the Italians, Nazi Germany, and—finally—the Greeks again. .

Alexandria (pronunciation: al-eggs-ZAN-dree-uh).
Egyptian city (still exists!).

Olympia (pronunciation: like the town in Washington).
Greek home to the original Olympics.

Giza (pronunciation: GEE-zuh).
Ancient city known almost exclusively for its pyramids. Read on.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
When complimenting your host on a hanging-gardens-of-spinach-dip display, or chatting about the Statue of Liberty, or attending a cocktail party hosted by a couple living in a lighthouse, or anytime mausoleums come up.

The Basics
For whatever reason, Greek historians made more lists than obsessive-compulsive housewives. And one of their favorite topics was Wonders of the World. The lists didn’t all include seven wonders, and didn’t always agree (some wonders, like the walls of the city of Babylon, just didn’t make the cut). By the sixth century CE, though, a standard list had emerged—the same one we use today:

THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GIZA
The Empire State Building was the world’s tallest building for 40 years (from 1931 to 1971). That seems impressive until you consider that, at 481 feet high, the Great Pyramid of Giza was the world’s tallest building for more than 4,000 years (from around 2560 BCE until the 19th century CE).

Wonderment Level: ★★★★★ The Great Pyramid gets full marks, if only because it’s the only ancient wonder still standing.

Quotable
According to a popular Arab proverb, “Man fears time, but time fears only the Pyramids.”

THE LIGHTHOUSE OF ALEXANDRIA
The very first lighthouse, it guided ships to the port of Alexandria (named for, and by, Alexander the Great) using a constantly burning fire that was reflected out to sea by a large mirror. The lighthouse was damaged by an earthquake in 1303 CE and collapsed soon after.

Wonderment Level: ★★★★ It was, for a time, the world’s second-tallest structure

THE STATUE OF ZEUS AT OLYMPIA
One of those ancient wonders that seems to have been picked by the Greeks because it was created by the Greeks, the statue of the bearded, lightning-hurling king of the gods, was built near the site of the Olympic games.

Wonderment level: ★ We know the Greeks invented democracy and everything, but that doesn’t give them license to go and label their every statue a wonder.

THE TEMPLE OF ARTEMIS AT EPHESUS
Twice as big as the Parthenon, the Temple of Artemis is relatively unknown today. Its 127 columns, each 60 feet tall, were all destroyed in 262 CE by the Goths.

Wonderment Level: ★★★ Today, Ephesus is primarily remembered for a letter, which ended up in the Bible, written to its residents by the Apostle Paul. But it was also one heck of a temple.

THE HANGING GARDENS OF BABYLON
Created by King Nebuchadnezzar II, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were built atop cube-shaped columns, and comprised dozens of high, beautifully landscaped terraces. The green-thumbed touches all gave Babylon the illusion of topography, which was exactly the point: Supposedly, Nebuchadnezzar’s wife was homesick for the mountainous land of her childhood, so he built them to cheer her up.

Wonderment Level: ★★★★ While definitely remarkable, the gardens weren’t nearly as impressive as their irrigation system, which required huge and exceedingly complex water-wheels (if you’ve ever been to Disney World, think Swiss Family Robinson).

THE MAUSOLEUM AT HALICARNASSUS
In 323 BCE, a minor king of a minor kingdom in Asia Minor died. His name was Mausolus, and his wife, who, incidentally, was also his sister, was devastated. (You would be, too, if you lost your brother and your husband all at once.) She built him a huge stone tomb that was so impressive that Mausolus, who would have otherwise been forgotten, lived on as a word: mausoleum.

Wonderment Level: ★★ Three stars for the impressive tomb. Subtract one star for marrying your sister.

THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES
Another Greek statue passing as a wonder of the world because it was built by Greeks? Well, yes. In 282 BCE, the people on the island of Rhodes erected a 110-foot bronze monument to their patron god, Helios. With its pointy crown, the statue bears a striking resemblance to another famous statue situated near an island city: the Statue of Liberty, which was actually modeled on the Colossus.

Wonderment Level: ★★ It may have inspired Lady Liberty, but the Colossus only stood for 55 years.

The Wonders of the World didn’t exactly cover the earth:
The farthest apart (Zeus and the Hanging Gardens) were separated by only about 1,200 miles. That’s approximately the distance between Boston and St. Louis.

Lighthouse Legends
Remember killing ants with a well-aimed magnifying glass on a sunny day? Well, imagine that phenomenon on a much larger scale. Legend has it that he huge mirror of the Alexandrian Lighthouse was used to concentrate and reflect sunlight on enemy ships, causing them to burst into flames. (If you’re wondering whether that is actually possible: No. It isn’t. But good story, ancient Alexandria!)

Conversation Starters
◆ From head to toe, the modern-day Statue of Liberty is nearly the same height as the ancient Colossus of Rhodes.

◆ Although the Lighthouse of Alexandria was built on the island of Pharos, in its heyday, Pharos was sort of the Coney Island of Alexandria. Visitors could climb to the top of the lighthouse to enjoy the view, and could even purchase snacks on its ground floor.

◆ A pharaoh named Khufu ordered the building of the Great Pyramid in honor of, uh, himself. Khufu, incidentally, wasn’t the best pharaoh who ever came down the pike. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, he “brought the country into all kinds of misery.” Maybe, but he’s been great for tourism ever since!

◆ Crusaders occupied Halicarnassus in 1522. Fearing an attack from the Turks, however, the Crusaders showed the kind of Christian piety and kindness for which they are famous, and decided to reinforce the walls of the town by stealing stones. But where could they get such fine materials? From the ruins of the town’s famed mausoleum, of course! By the time their foraging was complete, the mausoleum’s foundation was completely unrecognizable.