RJR Nabisco

Skydiver Bill Booth 's second rule states that "The safer skydiving gear becomes, the more chances skydivers will take, in order to keep the fatality rate constant."

A mangle being used in a domestic science course during World War II

Tollund Man , Denmark, 4th century BC

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?

Balut (food)

Balut is a boiled fertilized duck egg eaten at 16–18 days of development — the embryo inside has a beak, eye sockets, and visible feathers. In the Philippines, it is sold as street food at midnight.

Risk compensation

After seatbelt laws passed, Sam Peltzman measured the data: drivers sped up and followed closer, killing roughly the same number of car occupants — but significantly more pedestrians and cyclists.

Mangle (machine)

Two steel rollers squeezed laundry dry — and de-gloved hands at the wrist without stopping. Hospitals tracked the injuries by decade. The machine outlasted every safety campaign aimed at it.

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.

Bog body

Iron Age men, women, and children were pressed face-down into peat bogs; two thousand years later, Tollund Man surfaced with his stubble, stomach contents — last meal: porridge — and the noose still around his neck.

Bertelsmann

Bertelsmann printed millions of Nazi-era devotional books and Wehrmacht field hymnals during World War II, then commissioned a self-exonerating history in 1998. An independent commission contradicted it in full by 2002.

Galba

Galba reigned 7 months; soldiers dragged him from his litter in the Forum, hacked off his head, and a soldier named Terentius Rufus paraded it on a pole before selling it to his enemies for 100 gold pieces.

Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging

The AWB's tri-legged swastika flag flew at rallies where Eugene Terre'Blanche rode a white horse before crowds of 50,000 — a movement that threatened civil war, then imploded when apartheid ended anyway.