The Female Eunuch

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Predjama Castle

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Digitization of a Dunhuang manuscript

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Germaine Greer's 1970 'The Female Eunuch' argued femininity was not a softened version of humanity but its surgical removal — that the 'feminine woman' was the product of castration. It sold globally before second-wave feminism had a name.

Built directly into the mouth of a vertical cave high on a cliff face in Slovenia, Predjama Castle housed a rebel knight named Erasmus of Lueg who held off a siege for over a year by receiving supplies through a secret tunnel.

A physio bit open a fake blood capsule on the sideline so a player could be illegally swapped out. The capsule left red stains on his teeth. The entire scheme unraveled in 22 minutes.

Worth $100 million in 1900, Hetty Green wore the same black dress until it rotted and allegedly refused a surgeon's fee for her son Ned's infected leg — he lost the limb. She ate cold oatmeal to avoid heating it.

A monk walled up 40,000 manuscripts in Cave 17 at Dunhuang around 1000 AD, then plastered it shut. The cache included sutras, contracts, love poems, and a star atlas — forgotten until 1900.

130,000 workers built the atomic bomb without knowing it; the $23 billion secret hid entire cities. Trinity's test crater still glows faintly green with trinitite. What else have we built without knowing?

In 1989, KKR bought RJR Nabisco — cigarettes and Oreos under one roof — for $25 billion in a feeding frenzy that spawned a bestselling book and a defining Wall Street myth. Who actually won?

Thirty-nine people castrated themselves, donned identical black tracksuits and Nike Decades, and drank phenobarbital pudding to board the Hale-Bopp comet. Their bunk beds were made, bags packed, and hands folded across their chests.

Patti Smith spent years photographing Robert Mapplethorpe's hands — obsessively, serially — because, she wrote, she couldn't stop seeing them. Her 2010 memoir 'Just Kids' won the National Book Award and was written, she said, to keep a promise to a dying man.