"The Banishment of Hagar and Ishmael" by Adriaen van der Werff Yahweh made good on His promise and Sarah had her son right on time, despite her age and the lack of in vitro facilities in the Negev.   Abraham got to name him, obviously, since only a man would come up with a name like Isaac.   Abraham, something of a micromanager, also decided it should be up to him to circumcise the boy, and at eight days, he did it.   No parent in their right mind would trust a hundred-year-old man to serve as a mohel, but Abraham was enough of a control freak that he wasn’t bothered by this in the least.   Sarah, who was around her brother/husband Abraham’s age, was over the moon, and told as many people as she could. Sarah nursed Isaac, and on the day Isaac was to start solid food exclusively, Abraham threw a banquet, and everyone had fun.   This was a problem, because one of the people who had fun was Ishmael, the son Abraham had had with Hagar the sl...

The tallest (and pretty much only) structure on the island of Navassa.  In 1856, the United States Congress passed an interesting bill called the Guano Islands Act, which President Pierce didn’t have to think twice about signing into law.  The Guano Islands Act simply said that any citizen of the United States was permitted to claim any island they discovered as an American possession, provided that island had significant deposits of guano (aka bird poop) on it.  Any such islands, of course, could not be already possessed by another country.  The islands didn’t have to be very big, or even be islands at all.  It also applied to barren, uninhabitable rocks that might poke over the surface of the sea.  Now, the United States, like a number of other countries, was going through an expansionist period in the 19th century, but why would it care about small, remote islands like these?  They’re too small to colonize and too remote to be of strategic imp...

It seems like an obvious question: if we can ride horses, why not zebras?  After all, the two animals look similar, and no doubt split somewhat recently in evolutionary history.  Zebras are on average slightly smaller than horses, but they’re larger than ponies, and the pony was domesticated long ago.  Horses and ponies, indigenous to Asia, were first domesticated there by the humans who wandered there from Africa.  For much longer, humans and zebras have inhabited southern Africa together, living in the same region since the existence of the modern human beings.  In fact, zebras have been around longer than human beings have.  Africans never domesticated the animal, which they would no doubt have found plenty of use for, if they had. So why didn’t they figure out how to ride it?  Did it just never occur to anyone there to try?  Maybe it didn’t, but the more likely explanation is that zebras just aren’t as easy to climb up on as horses are. ...