Joe Hayashi

Logo of 1Malaysia Development Berhad

Front page cover of the newspaper L'Aurore for Thursday 13 January 1898, with the letter J'Accuse...! , written by Émile Zola about the Dreyfus affair . The headline reads I Accuse...! Letter to the President of the Republic .

01Raymond argued that surgeons performing sex reassignment were 'cutting off the possibility of' authentic gender deviance to maintain social norms.
02Sandy Stone, named by Raymond as a male infiltrator, responded in 1987 with 'The Empire Strikes Back,' now considered the founding text of trans studies.
03The book was republished in 1994 with a new preface in which Raymond declined to retract any of its core claims.

Joe Hayashi was shot twice and kept fighting, killing 11 Germans and destroying two gun positions in a single action near Tendola, Italy, 1945. He died days later. His Distinguished Service Cross sat in a drawer for 55 years.

Murray Sanders

Colonel Murray Sanders arrived in Japan with a briefcase and left with a deal: Ishii's plague data for full immunity. The exchange happened before any other Allied officer knew it was on the table.

Diocletian

In 305 AD, Diocletian became the first Roman emperor to voluntarily abdicate — then rejected offers to return and spent his final years at his Split palace growing cabbages, apparently content.

1MDB scandal

Malaysia's 1MDB sovereign wealth fund — created to build schools and hospitals — bought a $250 million superyacht, a Picasso, and financed The Wolf of Wall Street. The fund lost $4.5 billion. The prime minister who authorized it won an election first.

Vermin Supreme

Vermin Supreme has campaigned in every U.S. presidential race since 1992 wearing a rubber boot as a hat, promising mandatory tooth-brushing laws and one free government pony for every American citizen.

J'Accuse...!

Zola's open letter, published across the front page of L'Aurore on 13 January 1898, named eleven army and government officials by name. The editor printed 300,000 copies; Paris sold out before noon.

Baruch Spinoza

At 23, Spinoza received the harshest cherem—formal excommunication—in Amsterdam's Jewish community. The writ called his 'abominable heresies' and 'monstrous deeds' unspecified, and they remain unspecified to this day.

The Transsexual Empire

Janice Raymond's 1979 'The Transsexual Empire' argued that sex reassignment surgery wasn't liberation but a medical system eliminating gender-nonconforming bodies to protect the male-female binary. Sandy Stone answered it with a 1987 essay that founded trans studies.

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?