Timur

Artist's conception of a powerful magnetar in a star cluster

Plate 34: Por una navaja ( For a clasp knife ). A garroted priest grasps a crucifix in his hands. Pinned to his chest is a description of the crime for which he was killed—possession of a knife.

Outside Delhi in 1398, Timur's men assembled towers of 90,000 skulls. He killed perhaps 17 million people — roughly 5% of the world's population at the time.

Simmons Bedding Company

Simmons Bedding — maker of the Beautyrest mattress — was bought, loaded with debt, and sold seven times in a single generation of private equity deals, each time leaving workers with less and investors with more. The mattress never changed.

Benedict Arnold

Benedict Arnold — wounded twice in American service, the hero of Saratoga — negotiated the surrender of West Point to the British for £20,000 and a military commission. His handler, Major John André, was caught with the plans in his boot.

William Stewart Halsted

Halsted invented modern surgical residency, the mastectomy, and rubber gloves while injecting cocaine daily — then morphine to cure the cocaine. Johns Hopkins never knew. Did his addiction sharpen him, or did he succeed despite it?

Taichang Emperor

The Taichang Emperor reigned 29 days before dying — reportedly after swallowing red pills supplied by a court official named Li Kezhuo, whose formula was never fully disclosed.

Amelio Robles Ávila

Amelio Robles Ávila rode with Emiliano Zapata's forces through the Mexican Revolution, earning the rank of colonel through combat — then lived openly as a man for eight more decades, receiving veterans' recognition from the Mexican government in his nineties.

Magnetar

One teaspoon of magnetar crust outweighs Mount Everest; its magnetic field, at 10^15 gauss, would strip the iron from your blood from half the distance to the Moon.

The Disasters of War

Goya etched 82 plates of castrated soldiers, impaled civilians, and mass graves — then hid them. They weren't published until 1863, 35 years after his death. The plates still exist; one shows a man arranged like a broken doll.

Cassander

Cassander starved Alexander's mother Olympias to death in a sealed tomb, then had her son and Alexander's own son executed — methodically erasing the bloodline. He reportedly never met Alexander's eyes willingly.