Emperor Xian of Han

Enemies being killed and roasted in South America – engraving by Theodor de Bry (1592)

Zimbabwean banknotes ranging from 10 dollars to 100 billion dollars printed within a one-year period. The magnitude of the currency scalars signifies the extent of the hyperinflation.

Emperor Xian of Han

Emperor Xian reigned for thirty-one years as Cao Cao's hostage. He watched Cao Cao personally drag Empress Fu from her chambers and execute her inside the palace walls in 214 CE.

Gödel's incompleteness theorems

Gödel proved in 1931 that any system strong enough to do arithmetic contains true statements it cannot prove. Mathematics cannot certify its own foundations. The proof fits in a single paper published at age 25.

Human cannibalism

The Fore people of Papua New Guinea ate their dead as mourning rite; it transmitted kuru, a fatal prion disease, killing thousands. Women and children died faster — they ate the brain.

John Allen Muhammad

John Allen Muhammad recruited 15-year-old Lee Boyd Malvo and engineered the DC sniper campaign as cover for a planned single murder — his ex-wife — so a custody case would disappear. Ten strangers died for that calculation.

Pingfang, Harbin

Pingfang was a self-contained city — barracks, airstrip, crematorium, and 150 buildings — built by 15,000 conscripted Chinese laborers, most of whom were executed afterward to preserve secrecy.

Basil II

He blinded 15,000 Bulgarian prisoners and sent them home in columns of a hundred, each led by one man with a single eye. Tsar Samuel collapsed and died of shock two days later.

Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe

At its worst, Zimbabwe's inflation hit 89.7 sextillion percent annually. Workers were paid twice a day so they could spend wages before lunch erased the value.

Michael Dillon

Michael Dillon, the first trans man to undergo phalloplasty in 1946, later vanished from British society entirely — resurfacing in a Tibetan monastery, ordained as a Buddhist monk, having shed every identity the West assigned him.

Rhythm 0

Abramović stood motionless for six hours in 1974 while strangers chose freely from 72 objects — including a loaded pistol. Someone pressed it to her temple. She was weeping by the end, and didn't know it.