Woman on the Edge of Time

01Gotti personally supervised the hit from a Lincoln Town Car parked on East 46th Street, binoculars optional — the crowd was holiday-thick.
02Four gunmen in identical white trench coats fired simultaneously; underboss Thomas Bilotti was killed in the same volley, ten feet away.
03Castellano had been meeting with his personal chef and chauffeur, who doubled as his bodyguard and his wife's alleged lover.

"Queens" of Mysore : left, Krishnaraja Wadiyar III 's first wife, Devajammani has a discoloration around the mouth, thought to be due to the blowing of variolation dust in the nose ("nasal insufflation"). Right, his second wife shows the…

Woman on the Edge of Time

Marge Piercy's 1976 novel imagined a future where children gestate in communal 'brooders,' any person can breastfeed via hormone treatment, and gender has dissolved into three pronouns. It was assigned in feminist theory courses within two years of publication.

Robert Wadlow

Robert Wadlow stood 8 ft 11 in and wore size 37 shoes. His pituitary gland never received the signal to stop. He died at 22, still growing, from a brace that chafed into sepsis.

Shoko Asahara

Before releasing sarin on the Tokyo subway in 1995, Shoko Asahara sold his bathwater to followers for $800 a cup. He convinced a physician to murder members who tried to leave. He was hanged in 2018.

Paul Castellano

Paul Castellano was shot six times outside Sparks Steak House on December 16, 1985, while John Gotti watched from a car across the street — Castellano's dinner order was still waiting at the host stand.

District Six

Under the Group Areas Act, apartheid bulldozed Cape Town's District Six — a jazz-loud, mosque-and-church neighbourhood of sixty thousand people — and relocated them to sand flats twelve miles away. The rubble sat empty for decades.

Variolation

Ottoman physicians rubbed smallpox scabs into children's skin scratches centuries before Jenner's vaccine. The practice cut mortality from roughly 30% to under 2%, yet Europe called it barbarism until the death tolls reversed.

Kirby's Epic Yarn

Every single element — Kirby, enemies, clouds, mountains — is stitched from actual yarn, and no matter what hits him, Kirby simply unravels and gets sewn back together. Invincibility never looked so cozy.

Balfour Declaration

Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote 67 words to Lord Rothschild in 1917, promising a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Those 67 words are still quoted in international courts more than a century later.

Tonya Harding

Jeff Gillooly paid $6,500 to have a metal baton driven into Nancy Kerrigan's right knee in a Detroit corridor, weeks before the 1994 Olympics. Harding became the first American woman to land a triple Axel in competition.