Craig Newmark founded Craigslist in 1995. In 2017 The Ringer described it as a basic HTML website that rivals saw as “an outdated mess of hyperlinks.” Its mobile app came out only in 2019.
In 2022 a reporter asked Newmark why the site still looks the same. “Because that serves people better,” he said. “I’ve learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done.” The Ringer estimated the company’s revenue at $690 million for 2016. The company had about 50 employees.
From 1959, the New York agency Doyle Dane Bernbach advertised the Volkswagen Beetle in America. The ads did not pretend the car was beautiful. One tagline was “Ugly is only skin-deep.” A 1969 ad said: “It’s ugly, but it gets you there.”
Other ads sold what the car did. They praised its air-cooled engine and its easy-to-find spare parts. They also said the factory had more inspectors. In 1999 Advertising Age named it the best advertising campaign of the century.
In Raiders of the Lost Ark, a swordsman challenges Indiana Jones and brandishes a large sword. Indy draws his pistol and shoots him. Entertainment Tonight called it the moment “considered by most fans to be the funniest moment in the franchise.”
The script called for a long fight. Harrison Ford later said he was “quite ill with dysentery” and found the planned fight “too much.” He recalled asking Steven Spielberg why they did not just shoot the man. Spielberg answered: “I was thinking that, too!” Ford’s stunt double, Vic Armstrong, tells it differently. In his account, David Tomblin, who worked on the film, suggested the gun.
A popular story says that NASA spent a decade and millions of dollars on a pen that could write in zero gravity. The Russians, the story ends, used a pencil. The simple tool did the job, and the expensive one was a waste.
The story is false. Paul C. Fisher patented the pen in 1965. His own company paid about $1 million to develop it. NASA bought about 400 pens for the Apollo program. Sources differ on the price. PolitiFact gives $6 a pen, and Scientific American gives $2.39. Pencils were a risk in space, because broken tips could float and pencils can burn. In 1969 the Soviet Union bought 100 pens.
On October 28, 1980, Ronald Reagan debated President Jimmy Carter. In his closing statement he gave voters a list of questions. “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago?”
He also asked whether America was as respected and as strong as it had been. About 80.6 million people watched the debate. Candidates of both parties have asked the “better off” question in later campaigns.
“I can’t spare this man. He fights.” Americans often quote this as Abraham Lincoln’s answer to critics of General Ulysses S. Grant. The story is usually set in 1862, after the bloody battle of Shiloh, when newspapers and politicians called for Grant’s removal. Grant was also accused of drinking.
The source is the Pennsylvania politician Alexander McClure, who told it in his 1892 book Abraham Lincoln and Men of War-Times. McClure was himself a critic of Grant. Some historians doubt that Lincoln said it. William Marvel and Brooks D. Simpson note that McClure did not mention the remark until years after the war.
A second story appeared in the New York Times in 1863. In it, Lincoln asks which whiskey Grant drinks, so that he can send a barrel to his other generals. Lincoln denied saying it.
Before 1962, a new drug in the United States only had to be safe. Amendments passed that year added a second test. The FDA must find that a drug is both safe and effective. The proof must come from “adequate and well-controlled investigations, including clinical investigations.” Experts must be able to conclude that the drug “will have the effect it purports or is represented to have.”
The law does not ask how the drug works. Derek Lowe writes on drug research. He states: “There is, in fact, no requirement that a new drug’s mechanism of action be known at all.” The diabetes drug metformin reached the market without a known mechanism. Its mechanism is still debated.
In 1955 a man’s wife gave him a power tool for Christmas. Later a piece of wood flew out of the machine and struck him on the forehead. In 1963 the California Supreme Court ruled: “A manufacturer is strictly liable in tort when an article he places on the market, knowing that it is to be used without inspection for defects, proves to have a defect that causes injury to a human being.”
A similar rule appeared in 1965 in section 402A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts, a summary of American law. It applies even when “the seller has exercised all possible care in the preparation and sale of his product.” An injured user does not need to prove that the maker was careless. The user must show only that a defect in the product caused the injury.
The California court explained that the costs of such injuries should fall on manufacturers, not on “the injured persons who are powerless to protect themselves.” Some states have since dropped strict liability for product cases.
A federal law tells American appeals courts to decide cases “without regard to errors or defects which do not affect the substantial rights of the parties.” The rule for federal criminal trials is shorter. Such an error “must be disregarded.” In 1967 the Supreme Court noted that all 50 states had similar rules.
In 1946 the Supreme Court explained where the rule came from. It quoted a trial judge who said appeals courts towered “as impregnable citadels of technicality.” The Court added that in many jurisdictions a criminal trial had become “a game for sowing reversible error in the record.”
In that case the Court asked whether the error had “substantial and injurious effect or influence in determining the jury’s verdict.” Under the rule, showing a mistake is not enough. Some rights are an exception. The Supreme Court has called them “so basic to a fair trial” that a violation “can never be treated as harmless error.”
There’s no such thing as an ugly win. — A win counts the same however it looked. The football coach and broadcaster John Madden said it in 2011. In 2022 Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, said it after a 12 to 9 win and added: “There’s no such thing as a beautiful loss.”
There’s no style points in this league. — Sean McVay, coach of the Los Angeles Rams, said it after a 17 to 9 win.
A win is a win. — People say it about a narrow or messy victory. It is often stretched to “a win is a win is a win.”
Just win, baby. — This was the motto of Al Davis, longtime owner of the Oakland Raiders.
No harm, no foul. — A rule was broken, but nobody was hurt, so it does not count. In basketball it describes contact that the referee does not call. The Los Angeles Lakers list it among the sayings of their broadcaster Chick Hearn, but it was in print by 1954.